Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co? - <AUTHOR> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2011/06/11/ <comment><USER2> 1\. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc.

2\. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice.

3\. Filters mail at the server side.

4\. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month.

Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.

<comment><USER3> Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc.

Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip.

I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.

<comment><USER4> Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)

<comment><USER5> Aren't you a little bit uncomfortable giving Google all that data? Do you keep a back-up??

<comment><USER6> Not even a little bit.

Total number of times Google has lost my data: 0

Total number of times I have accidentally lost my own data: Way more than 0

Total number of times Google has in any way caused me harm by having "access" to my e-mails: 0

Total number of times I've been glad Google used intelligence gathered from my e-mails: Many (pre-populating Google+ circles, training a great spam filter, Priority Inbox, great search, decently appropriate and well-targeted ads)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups?_

Because we're lazy.

 _you give away control over your personal data_

Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.

 _you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction_

A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.

Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.

 _you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication_

Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.

<comment><USER8> _Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too._

You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.

<comment><USER9> Back up your email! Just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make a backup.

I just run getmail which retrieves mail via Gmail's IMAP interface every now and then. If Gmail went away tomorrow, I wouldn't be _that_ sad.

<comment><USER10> Don't use IMAP for backups, use POP3 instead. If your e-mails are deleted in the cloud, your local IMAP e-mails will disappear as well.

<comment><USER11> Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.

<comment><USER12> Gmail POP does not deleted mail as you read it. I have a POP client on my Mac that output pulls Gmail as a backup of my webmail. Nothing gets deleted.

<comment><USER11> Ok you're right about it not deleting by default. But there is an option to delete mail after its been accessed with POP. And in any case Gmail hides the message after you've read it, but you could still have an error writing the message to disk and thus miss backing that message up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.

2\. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.

3\. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.

<comment><USER14> > 2\. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's > functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.

Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.

<comment><USER15> The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

<comment><USER16> +1 for willing to pay for secure email.

<comment><USER17> Ok that's 2 customers who are also HNers. I think you'd need to do better than that. We are hardly a representative of the general consumer.

There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages. For example <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail>, people seemed to have signed up, but Hushmail was forced to provide plaintext messages to US govt upon request. So they sort of compromised their main selling point.

That is probably the largest problem, you'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either please your security conscious customers or please Uncle Sam. You can't please both.

<comment><USER18> "There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages."

You're assuming the service has to be located within the US. Why?

<comment><USER17> It doesn't have to, but unless it is located in Iran, NK or other US- unfriendly place, US govt can always pressure the local govt to pressure the local business to turn things over. I wouldn't, for example, count on countries like Switzerland, US is already getting to its banks to turn over US accounts, and is supposed to be one of the most independent and un-influenced countries.

With the current legislation trend, eventually un-cooperative or "terrorist friendly" sites would just be filtered out and blocked, so you might have a hard time accessing your email. Some messages might never make it to you.

<comment><USER19>
      > US govt can always pressure the local govt

That depends. In some places, the privacy laws are better than in the US. You would just have to choose wisely.

<comment><USER20> > In some places, the privacy laws are better than in the US.

That's nice, you still believe that the laws on file actually govern how the country is run.

Bug if you follow e.g. how the spanish SOPA-like was passed, you realize it's all a facade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I took "the pragmatic UNIX way" about 15 years ago with email. It works. I've not had to change it and don't feel compelled to bother changing it.

I host my own mail server. It's not hard regardless of the platform you use. I use debian+postfix+mutt as it pretty much works out of the box. I've changed perhaps two lines of postfix configuration (to set up maildir) and added a couple of lines to my muttrc to pick up maildir and view html mail using links.

I don't get SPAM at all. I don't stick my email address anywhere on the Internet where it will get snagged into a spam database. I never have. I've not had a single SPAM message in 15 years with the same email address. I do not use any spam filtering software.

I use aliases for mailing lists which are created and destroyed on demand using a couple of 2 line scripts ("append, newalises" -and- "sed, newalises").

I can get into it quite happily from anywhere using SSH on my mobile device using MIDPSSH or another machine with PuTTY, iSSH, or good old terminal SSH.

I don't keep emails ever. I action them, then throw them away. Those who keep everything are like the crazy old people who live in rooms stacked to the ceiling with newspapers. I have nothing to backup or care for in that department. If I lose my mailbox, I have lost nothing.

I do not manage my tasks with email. I use a text file in my home directory called notes.txt.

My contacts list is a text file called contacts.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.

My calendar is a text file called cal.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.

I probably spent about an hour in the last 10 years on email server configuration. That's considerably less time than some of my peers spend dredging through their 5 years of gmail junk.

Self respecting hackers don't use Gmail and Co.

<comment><USER22> _"Self respecting hackers don't use Gmail and Co."_

Are you not self-respecting? Just a few days ago, you said:

 _"I've got offline gmail if i want."_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533625>

<comment><USER21> If I want i.e. I can download offline gmail if I want to. If you see my follow up reply, I did trial Google Apps but it didn't cut it. Part of that trial was to use the MIDP version of Google Mail. I don't use it now but it's there if I wanted to.

It would be unfair of me to blindly criticise Google Mail without trialling it, which I did.

Hope this clears things up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1\. Because Google solved the spam problem better than anyone else has

2\. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work

3\. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (<https://www.backupify.com/>)

4\. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.

It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.

Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER24> 1) Black listing - if someone in your IP neighborhood sends spam you can be silently blacklisted by Comcast, AOL, some random crazy zealots running a blacklist that other random people choose to use… et.al. and people stop getting your mail. Good luck getting unlisted. Wasted hours. Sometimes it's futile.

2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.

Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.

Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.

<comment><USER25> I hosted my own e-mail on a VPS for a few months before going back to Google Hosted e-mail, mainly for the two reasons you list here. I do want to go back to hosting it myself though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Because GMail users have different values than the OP does, and it's morally presumptuous to assume everyone makes the same tradeoffs the OP does.

Why their choices don't make sense to him is because he hasn't taken the time to understand the value systems of GMail users.

<comment><USER27> This point can't be made often enough. I can't say that I think there are "too many" (or even "an increasing number") of posts on HN that seem to assume that everyone here has precisely the same set of (often extreme) values, but these kinds of presumptuous, somewhat self-righteous postings do pop up from time to time, and this is precisely the reaction I always have. The definition of "self-respecting hacker" does, after all, probably very between self- respecting hackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is link-bait, but I'll bite.

Simply put, Gmail provides a compelling user experience:

* fast and accurate search. This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature. Decent here means "answer full-text queries accurately within a second or so". I didn't realize how useful this was until switching to Gmail; now I have it, I can't switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.

* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.

<comment><USER28> My experience is the polar opposite. I have to rely on a native client to search because GMail search is so bad. It hasn't been that fast for a while -- waiting 30+s for a search is pretty routine nowadays. But worse, it's never really handled stemming well -- it has to be an exact word match, even for singular vs plural. And the number of false positives I get usually doesn't even make it worthwhile. I had resorted to deleting mail rather than archiving it, but that only helped marginally.

Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.

<comment><USER29> 30s searches....I've gotta ask, how many gigabytes of email do you have? I've got about 3 and mine come back in less than a second.

<comment><USER30> I have almost 2.5 GB's and also have zero problems with GMail's default search. Comes back in less than a second.

<comment><USER28> Maybe it's number of messages vs size of store. Or perhaps because a large percentage are similar in structure (google groups, monit alerts, etc.), they cause indexing to perform poorly. Dunno. But I wish I had < 1s searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I get some of the article's points, but I don't buy his solutions.

Quite frankly, I trust Gmail to keep my mail safe and secure more than I trust either myself, my friends or some NGO or other non-profit. I'd be lying to myself to think that I could do a better job of keeping a mail server secure, and I trust other small organizations even less. While I understand why the privacy issues make people uncomfortable, from a reliability perspective, Gmail is far and away the best option. So I can easily see why people might be willing to pay the privacy price in order to get better service.

</comment><comment><USER32> When people have to choose between usability, accessibility, and reliability VS security and privacy they _almost_ always choose the former. My response to this would be "Why do self-respecting open source and security advocates refuse to do the hard work of making security and privacy easily available to everyone?"

<IMHO>Laziness, disinterest, and fear of killing off lucrative security consulting.</IMHO>

<comment><USER33> There's no privacy in either case. Every single email passes in clear text through some ISP who may very well be storing copies of them. If you want privacy, you use PGP.

<comment><USER32> That's what I'm getting at. Have you tried using GPG? Most "security" products (or projects) have terrible usability.

Disclaimer: I work on a "security" product.

<comment><USER34> "Usability" is ill-defined. GPG seems to have pretty good "usability" from mutt (which auto signs outgoing email and optionally encrypts with a keypress). Maybe your MUA is broken or you forgot to RTFM.

<comment><USER32> Usability (as I've employed it) is when someone non-technical can derive benefit from something beyond their understanding. Rest assured I've read every line of the GPG man page and then some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Because it's the best email system available for most people. If you value productivity and usability the most, Gmail is the way to go. It's that simple.

Gmail is the only email system that I can tolerate. It actually makes using email borderline fun, whereas even something like Exchange is a nightmare. It works great with various applications, smartphones and has by far the best Web interface around. It handles spam well and allows me to easy filter messages (and have those filters work across devices).

For most of us, email is a tool that helps us get work done and communicate with family and friends. Rolling our own solutions is not worth the extra time, headaches and lost usability.

Google doesn't care about our data individually. They make money in anonymized, aggregate data. That's why I don't care that they are making money off of my data, because it's not my data that they care about. It's our data that they really care about.

And while I'd prefer if my email didn't fall into the hands of the US government, I don't actually have anything that I care that they see in it. It's more principle than anything else. And, as a US citizen, if I rolled my own solution, I don't think it would be any safer in my hands than Google's when it comes to warrants.

I do have real fears. My real fears with email are in using a system that isn't usable, isn't reliable and has data integrity issues. At the end of the day, Google's servers and technical know-how surpasses mine, and I feel that my email is safer and less likely to be lost due to hardware failure in their hands than in mine.

It really depends on what you value. If my email information was really sensitive, I would probably care more. If I were a company that valued sensitivity a lot, I might not use Gmail. Certainly if the work you do or the industry you are in needs the utmost privacy, you should look into the most secure option as possible.

But as an individual, Gmail is as good as it gets for me.

</comment><comment><USER36> One point about privacy: E-mail is unencrypted and is delivered over public networks.

 _Assume_ that any government, be it your own, US or other _will_ read your email if they so please, and encrypt anything you don't want them to read.

<comment><USER37> This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.

<comment><USER38> Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.

<comment><USER39> Is that before or after you write a gui interface using visual basic to track an IP address? :/

<comment><USER38> To be fair, this is a guy who does hardened, embedded RTOSes. In the normal world implementation, of course crypto matters.

Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Until recently the GMail web interface was simply unmatched. When GMail first shipped, their conversation view was so far ahead of what anyone was doing on the web or in a fat client. I don't try out as many email platforms as I used to, but from what I have seen, it's still the best implementation of conversation view available.

Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."

Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).

I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.

<comment><USER41> You imply that Gmail's web interface has been matched... I have not yet seen that to be the case, any suggestions?

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S Because we care about efficiency, not least with regards to our time, and running one's own mail server is not an efficient use of such a scarce resource.

<comment><USER42> It is if you don't want a potential competitor, potential acquirer, or just a large amoral corporation, to have an informational advantage over you.

<comment><USER12> I would LOVE for someone at Google to violate their TOS and read my mail. That would be far more profitable than any business idea I will execute this year.

<comment><USER43> > That would be far more profitable than any business idea I will execute this > year.

Why do you assume that you would ever learn about it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A simple answer: because running one's own mail server has little/nothing to do with being a "self-respecting hacker".

For myself personally, it's because I value my time being spent elsewhere on things I consider more important.

I simply don't care if that approach earns me a label of "non-self-respecting hacker" (as the original author implies).

</comment><comment><USER45> Because email sucks. Hosting email sucks. Email clients suck. (Bonus: email spam sucks). On Gmail it sucks a bit less.

I'm sorry for myself in the first place, but until I can code my dream of an email killer (or email client fwiw) that does not suck, avoid making my eyes bleed (and make it a success...) I can't avoid gmail.

</comment><comment><USER46> Funny. I just asked for alternatives to Gmail and other hosted software on the Richard Stallman post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551345>

Harald's suggestions boil down to

      - share the administrative and financial effort with friends
      - use hosting form NGOs or non-profits
      - use small companies and ISPs

The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?

Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...

<comment><USER47> > If you host your own what software?

Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.

A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)

Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.

I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?

<comment><USER48> Getting the email server set up is easy, almost trivially so.

It's dealing with all the other issues that's an immense pain. SpamAssassin is not always a magic bullet, deliverability to third-party mail servers can be a major problem even if you follow all the rules, and Gmail's UI has a number of advantages that many mail programs can't compete with.

If you compare the hours of time a month that takes with the up-front elimination of hassle that Google Apps provides, it's not hard to see why a hacker might prefer to just outsource it and focus on tasks more pleasing to them.

<comment><USER49> Exactly, setting up a mail server is not hard. What's hard is that you have to keep your server secure; have to make backups, and make sure that backups work; have to troubleshoot problems when mails are not delivered, god knows how much time does it take; have to train your spam filter to get to the level as half efficient as Gmail is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just to give you an idea of how popular Gmail is, about 67% of the 7000+ subscribers for Hacker Newsletter (<http://www.hackernewsletter.com>) use gmail and I'm sure a good bit more are Google app accounts.

To add to this, yahoo.com is second with 3%.

</comment><comment><USER51> I use Gmail because I don't care about my emails. Google can know that I'm subscribed to the Haskell, FSF and school mailing lists and that I sometimes talk about school projects or work, all without affecting me much. And that is all I use email for.

Now, I _could_ run an email server myself, but I do not have the time, experience or inclination to do this. I _could_ also use a provider that does not use proprietary software, but that would be pointless: since they're running the server, I would not have significantly more freedom than I do with Gmail.

So really, the reason is simple: it doesn't matter much from a practical or ideological standpoint, and I'm incredibly lazy.

</comment><comment><USER52> I used to always set up and run my own mail servers. I no longer do so, not because I'm lazy, but because I have better things to do with my time than be a sys-admin, and worry about downtime, logs, security, and backups.

Sure, Google has your mail. So use multiple accounts and keep your really private communications somewhere else, or use S/MIME or PGP Mail.

But who the hell cares about them having data for an account that is mostly subscribed to public mailing lists?

</comment><comment><USER53> well, i don't. spamassassin works fine. mairix on ssd searches as fast as google. mutt is an excellent reader; it can be used remotely via ssh.

none of this is hard. it doesn't require huge amounts of maintenance. and i own my own data.

before this, when leaving gmail, i looked around for an alternative webmail provider and almost went with runbox <http://www.runbox.com/> \- they seemed to be the best of the bunch, avoiding many of the issues with gmail (being based in norway). but in the end it seemed easier to just do it myself.

</comment><comment><USER54> The article presents a fair argument, but the title is obviously flame bait.

Granted, I myself thought of setting up my own mail server, but the disadvantages quickly outweighed the benefits. If your argument is sheer privacy, unless you are hosting your mail on a physical machine at your house connected to your home ISP (which is pretty dumb if you want ~100% uptime), you will most likely either use a VPS or managed system under the control of yet another company, which privacy-wise is the equivalent of using Gmail anyway.

I'm sure setting up your own hobby mail server would be pretty fun and provide great deals of experience, but if you are doing so simply for data privacy or better up time, your point is moot, and you will probably be better off just using a provider like Google.

</comment><comment><USER55> None of his alternatives — team up with family and friends to maintain a mail server, join a nonprofit to use their email (WTF?), use email from a small ISP — seem remotely practical for most people, so no wonder they use Gmail. Even worse, aside from the first alternative, all of his objections seem to apply to the alternatives as well (only with the name of the new email host in place of "Google").

</comment><comment><USER56> I have messed with running my own email server from time to time, but it generally takes about a day before I get an email bounced back thanks to the overzealous IP blacklists--for instance, as I recall, all Comcast dynamic IPs are blocked automatically by Spamhaus. Great, so I either need to pay extra for a static IP which _might_ be non-blacklisted, or I can pay for hosting and just hope _that's_ not blacklisted. Gmail is big enough and rich enough to stay off the blacklists, I'm not. So I use Google Apps hosting, even though I'd rather not.

</comment><comment><USER57> Unfortunately I cannot live without the Gmail web client. There is no comparison (even with the, worse for me, new layout). It's fast everywhere, even via my bad phone internet connection, it indicates properly when it can and cannot send stuff etc. It's just better than anything I know and have.

I have tried to use other things, but for my, quite insanely big mailbox, nothing else works. Not only did I import into Gmail all my mail I received since the late 80s, I also get immense amounts of email through the system as I use mail for creating alerts and emergency lists on servers I monitor and such. Wether or not this is proper use of mail (I think it is; I am very productive with ONLY the mail client open; everything I need comes to me in there, neatly filtered, including news, server health, error logs, bug tracking etc; everything has it's own email address I can mail and receive mail from), it works very well, but it's not supported by normal clients; Mail.app just stands there getting mail with high CPU load and Thunderbird is unusable as in stuck all the time (I haven't tried that for a while, but it used to be anyway). Gmail webclient is just nice and fast since the last infrastructure update Google did (the engineers mailed me nicely that I wouldn't be able to use my mail for about 1-2 days while migrating and this proved to be true).

I know what I need instead of mail (but including mail functionality); I just don't think it has been built yet :) Or has it?

</comment><comment><USER58>
      You team up with some friends, people you know and trust, and you share the administrative and financial effort

I have been burned by people I trusted much more often than by google.

      You use a local, small Internet service company rather than one of the big entities.

How is that better? You're still bequeathing your data to a commercial third party.

I get the OP's point, and hope I never have to eat my own words, but the reasons to go through all the hassle of moving out of google et al aren't all that compelling imo.

</comment><comment> UK-Al05 Because a hackers time is valuable, and google has solved my email requirements. I dont want to set up and maintain a email server. It can be annoying as hell I've done it before. It's 'fiddly'. So many config files(If you set it up properly so it uses encryption) and a lot of email services will block you if your not on a whitelist or sometimes blacklist you for silly reasons. I used to run my businesses email on ec2, you will be going through blacklists and whitelists for a long long time.

</comment><comment><USER59> 1\. Setting up a mail server and keeping it running isn't easy 2\. Spam filtering 3\. (already mentioned) uptime - you don't want to lose email 4\. The security of your email doesn't depend only on you - it also depends on where people you are communicating with are hosting their email.

It's much easier to get search privacy since the only other entity involved is the search engine. Which is why I use <https://duckduckgo.com/> for search.

</comment><comment><USER60> Lot's of space Great spam filter that catches 100,04% of spam ( 0.04% non- spam) Easy and fast search options Integration with calander, docs View and save PDF, DOC, XLS, from within browser Great interface Good apps for Iphone, Android, Ipad Some nice integration options with Chrome browser Sign in at lost of places with your gmail account (stack overflow much?) I don't have to spell out the provider g.m.a.i.l. when I say my address to somebody.

</comment><comment><USER61> Note that he's basing all this on looking at _mailing_ _lists_. There are surely many people who, like me, who often use gmail for mailing lists, but have our own mail servers for our "normal" mail.

</comment><comment><USER62> Because being a hacker is about being curious and building stuff.

It is not about keeping some strange 60ies style counter culture/down with the man going.

</comment><comment><USER63> Two-factor authentication is a big feature for me. I don't have to worry about anyone logging into my account without my cell phone.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm sure there are many other reasons, but also, at the time it rolled out (and/or when they integrated Postini), Gmail was sort of a miracle cure for spam. Just sign up, and spam-be-gone. A lot of people wanted such a "fire and forget" solution.

</comment><comment><USER65> Because gmail is a good product.

Please don't tell us what not to use. Point us to a better product. (spam, uptime, ease of use, free, fast, etc) Got one?

Yeah, I figured.

</comment><comment><USER66> Honestly at the end of the day it comes down to spam control for me. I'm done trying to configure adaptive spam filters or finding the latest spam list to scan against. Its not worth my time to deal with that anymore.

</comment><comment><USER67> I self hosted mail til 2008.. Sometime in 2008 we were travelling more than at home so I moved to a virtual private server. During those travels, the VPS had catastrophic failures so I bit the bullet and moved the domain to google apps and it worked quite well. The intention was to move back to my own hosting when settled again, the gmail keyboard shortcuts are so good (not quite mutt) which has kept me there.

I use offlineimap to keep a local backup of my email, and like anyone should, I think of emails as postcards. If its only to be read by the recipient use encryption!

</comment><comment><USER68> Because it has an ease of access and the plethora of related network effects. Plus, I know more than a few ways to send any information that I would be that concerned about other than through gmail.

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't quite understand the constant articles about someone who is thumbing their nose at the "other idiots" who don't care about privacy. Is it not common knowledge that even if you never set foot online your private information has long been dispersed and used for much more than it ever should? We all should be more concerned with the places that we enter information that does not disclose how it is used in a friendly online location (banks, products, doctors office, grocery store etc...).

</comment><comment> the-come-ons I host my own mail server on a VPS. I made a clear cut from the big G about a year ago. I switched to duckduckgo.com as my main search engine, installed noscript, blocking all analytics requests, and set up my own mail server on Arch Linux using dovecot, postfix, and spam assassin. This setup has been wonderful and I feel proud to use it since I was once afraid of various issues which, in reality, have been minimal! I can access my mail from any computer or mobile device that allows SSH or has an IMAP mail client.

Once after a system upgrade mail was no longer being delivered to my inbox. I noticed after a day and thought it was strange. I forgot to reboot the mail server software after upgrading. Soon after my mail server rebooted I had many emails delivered from when my mail server was down. This excited and surprised me. I thought I would never get those emails but I assume the mail clients just held on to them and tried sending again intermittently.

Any self-respecting hacker should at least try to setup a mail server on a virtual machine. The hacker will find it interesting and useful. It really only takes a couple hours and it is fun! For those hackers who are brave enough, here is the guide that I used:

<http://www.gelens.org/archlinux-mailserver/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sending mailservers typically try to redeliver mails for several days if something goes wrong (and if your mailserver does not respond with a permanent error).

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Because the last thing I want to do is worry about managing my mail server, I have better things to do that ensure that have spam and webmail configured as nicely as Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER71> Every time I email someone else who uses Gmail I'm right back to the same predicament.

</comment><comment><USER72> deliverability.

I can't post to W3C administered mailing lists from my real email account because my domain gets bounced.

I've lost out on business deals because mail from business account gets blocked at the firewall in some places.

You can avoid all that with gmail.

</comment><comment><USER73> Surprised no one has mentioned FastMail [1] already. Excellent service, reasonable price.

It's good to be a paying customer, so if something goes wrong there is a sense of accountability for the service provider to remedy the situation.

With Gmail and other free service providers, remember that you are not the customer, you are the product -- for advertisers.

1) <http://fastmail.fm/>

</comment><comment><USER74> This is a pointless comment, but with all the whining here I feel like making a counterpoint.

I run my own mail/irc/web/file/etc -server. Postfix on OpenBSD with maybe 10 config variable changes to add a DNS blacklist of my choice + secondary MX for a friend. FDM for sorting mail and piping stuff through bogofilter. Mutt and SSH to read mail from anywhere.

I post my email address everywhere and get about 10-15 spam mails per day that escape the blacklist. Of those, 99% are sorted out by bogofilter. I scan them for false positives like I scan other mailinglists for interesting topics. There are about 700 mails from various ml's every day. The maintenance time this setup "costs" is recovered in less than a week of not having to click through the slow gmail interface. There is nothing to do. Backups are done via rsync and cron, but they have to be done anyway.

Point is, running a private mail server is easy. But then I don't call myself hacker...

<comment><USER33> _The maintenance time this setup "costs" is recovered in less than a week of not having to click through the slow gmail interface._

Nothing forces you to use the Gmail interface to use their mail servers, though. I certainly don't, unless I'm away from my machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> If my accounts were shut down and all my email handed over to any 3 letter agency on earth, I'd be mildy annoyed. Dare I say, _inconvenienced_. For like a day. There just isn't anything in it worth worrying about.

I can be up and running on another provider in minutes while they wade through my Amazon.com receipts and bug reports for CRUD apps.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is actually a pretty good indicator that integrating PGP in a usable "it just works" fashion might be a really good thing to do these days. If the question is why are you allowing google the ability to violate your privacy, the solution of running your own mail server is only valid to the extent that we acknowledge the current reality that the vast majority of people do not use encryption or signing for email correspondence.

How about a simple sign / encrypt / forward service for untrusted (ie, pretty much everything) hosted email accounts that takes all incoming unsigned/unencrypted mail and at least encrypts it before delivering it to your untrusted mail server? Of course then the issue is how do you prove that you're any more trustworthy than google or any other party, but it's an interesting problem to consider.

</comment><comment><USER76> Email isn't secure and should not be treated as such. None of the author's suggestions change this. The only way to be sure private email communication is private is to use encryption and only communicate over email with others who will do so and will keep their system secure.

</comment><comment><USER77> Sorry, when I just throw two links in, but the people who like GMail for the way you handle your emails with it there are at least two interesting projects.

<http://sup.rubyforge.org/>

<http://notmuchmail.org/>

</comment><comment><USER78> I live in a world where I expect and need email access from anywhere, any computer, any mobile device. I also expect tight integration with calendar and contacts. Those requirements mean I need webmail and ActiveSync. IMAP Idle (push) has reasonable mobile support, but CalDAV and CardDAV have limited support -- so ActiveSync it is. ActiveSync is non-existent in open source software. The best webmail client I've used that can be used with any IMAP server is Roundcube, but it doesn't have calendar support. Zimbra is the only open source software I've seen with good mail+calendar+contact integration, and it has a good web client. Perfect, except the open source version doesn't support ActiveSync, and is missing the backup utilities. The commercial version is a minimum $399/year. Fine, I'll pay it.

Now I need to host it. I want my email to be highly available. So I want to cluster two Zimbra servers in one data center, and cluster two backup MXs in another data center to store and forward my mail if the Zimbra DC drops off the net. Zimbra supports HA clustering with Red Hat Cluster Suite or through the HA clustering of virtualization like VMware. RHCS requires a highly available SAN as backend. Damn, an HA SAN is going to be expensive. Maybe I'll do VMs. But virtualization products like VMware and RHEV will require an HA SAN or NAS. Fine, I'll build an HA NAS with open source.

I'll deploy two ZFS heads in an active-active cluster... wait, clustering will require purchasing licenses from a company like Nexenta. Or I can get active- passive from iXsystems. So I'll buy the cheapest Nexenta license which is $1725, plus the HA Cluster license for $4900. I'll connect those heads to a dual-controller SAS JBOD which only costs $3795.

I'm now going to fly all this gear to a non-US-friendly location to install it in a data center. Each piece of hardware as redundant power supplies. I will connect the power supplies to separate power distribution units, the PDUs are on separate circuits. Each system has dual Ethernet going to separate switches, which in-turn uplink to dual-clustered routers, which uplink to the multi-homed internet provided by the data center. Because I'm on the other side of the world I'll also have a console server, and the PDUs can remotely cycle power.

Awesome! I now have the email setup I want, and it only cost me $30,000 and a month of my time!

Or I can sign up for Google Apps, where they will host my domain's email, and provide all the features I want, and have a better interface, and not require maintenance, and have better uptime, all for free!

I've administered old school sendmail+procmail setups without webmail. I've administered Postfix+Dovecot+Roundcube+LDAP. I've administered Zimbra. I've administered Google Apps for Business. It isn't worth my time and money to do anything other than Google Apps.

</comment><comment><USER79> Judging by the replies, it seems to be a combination of preferring webmail and having poor ISPs.

Personally, I have run my own email server for several years now and have found this to require almost no maintenance. On the server side I use Postfix and Dovecot on Debian, and on the client side I use Thunderbird. For security, I only allow local IMAP connections and tunnel IMAP and SMTP from my laptop over SSH tunnels set up when I log in, and the server only accepts public key authorisation for SSH.

IMAP means I get any email within seconds and Thunderbird automatically sifts away 95% of what little spam I receive. The server is under my desk and the only downtime I have is for kernel upgrades and problems on the ISP end, which are both rare.

</comment><comment><USER80> I just stayed up all night setting up my own on Linode. I barely know anything about servers. I wanted to do it for months and have tried for weeks.

I use a lot of google stuff and wanted to move off. I trust Linode a lot more than I trust google.

Now roundcube is working and I am a happy camper.

</comment><comment><USER81> Well, to answer the question head-on. I am a self-respecting hacker and I do run my own private mail server for my personal mail.

But I use Gmail for what I think of as "impersonal" mail. This includes mailing lists such as those operated by the OP, as well as general notifications from other sites and services. I gain free storage and bulk management tools for a body of data I perceive of low value and sensitivity.

Moreover, Gmail's spam filters are better than mine (spamassassin). That has particular utility for these low-value accounts that are more likely to have the associated email address disclosed beyond my control.

For things I care more for; personal communications and so forth, well, they still land on the private host.

</comment><comment><USER82> It's easy, safe, secure and fast - but I also have an Yahoo Mail account as backup.

And you can't beat the price, unless everybody decides to go French and fine Google for providing a great service for free when there are other companies that do it for a fee :-)...

</comment><comment><USER83> Because I've never once found a decent no-nonsense no-ugly-web-interface- preinstalled-that-I-don't-want guide, and unlike anything else I have installed on my server, I find email baffling.

I'd switch if someone gave me a decent enough guide I'd go for it.

</comment><comment><USER84> Frees up more time for hacking.

<comment><USER85> Pretty much this. I spend more than enough time fiddling with things as it is. Moreover, the article latches on to security/privacy whereas my primary concern is ease of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> <code> But almost all of those lists are about very technical projects, where the only subscriber base should be people from either the IT security community, or the Free Software community.</code>

Sample bias.

Why would I be concerned about anything other than convenience with regards to the email account used for public email lists? The messages are public, my address is already likely been harvested, so anything I do is essentially public.

If I want to keep stuff private, that is maybe the time to set up my own email system. And use encryption and all the good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER87> For a while now, I have used GMail purely as a drop box from which I fetch my mail (and delete from my account).

I'm hoping once the Raspberry Pi is released, I can get a good personal mail server going again.

</comment><comment><USER88> Here are two reasons: it is convenient and it is easy to always have an up to date copy of GMail and other Google services data on my laptop which I then backup locally.

</comment><comment><USER43> Setting the privacy and security issues aside, I wonder why do so many self- respecting hackers use the Gmail web interface (instead of, say, fetching their mail via IMAP and use another client). Dedicated mail clients like mutt can be much more efficient (keyboard-driven) and are a lot more customisable (run macros, pipe mail through external commands, etc.). I wonder why so many hackers aren't put off by Google's "one size fits all" approach.

<comment><USER56> Gmail's keyboard shortcuts are really pretty nice. hjkl to move around, enter to view a message, y to archive, m to mute, r to reply. That's a pretty damn good start.

off-topic, it's a little weird how it's expected that "true hackers" must become ill at the very sight of a mouse.

<comment><USER43> Yes, I know that Gmail has some keyboard shortcuts. I'm also aware that you can even customize them to some extent, but the flexibility has nothing to do with mutt's.

To give a concrete example, I am moderating some institution's mailing lists through a pretty exotic system, and I rely heavily on my mutt configuration to accept/reject mail and prepare rejection mail. In one keystroke, for instance, I prepare a reply to a certain MIME part of an incoming email notification and pipe it through a script to add boilerplate text and edit the message headers automatically. I wonder why so many hackers prefer Gmail's convenience to this sort of flexibility.

As for the mouse, like the keyboard, it is a tool which is appropriate for certain tasks and less appropriate for others. I think the keyboard is more appropriate to deal with email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> It's quite simple: "self-respecting hackers" care more about getting shit done than futzing around with their email service. Gmail (for the most part) Just Works.

</comment><comment><USER90> It obviously boils down to "good enough" and "free enough" but I've planned on moving back to Postfix/Dovecot at home for the reasons outlined, just a time thing.

<comment><USER91> I've been thinking of doing this myself as I've heard great things about Dovecot. An ideal setup for me would be a VM hosted somewhere in the cloud (presumably my hosted VM can't be warrently searched in the same way as email), running a barebones Arch+Postfix/Dovecot. The only inhibitors are cost of hosting and time of setup, if anyone has information on either good hosting solutions or setup information I think it would be a useful addition to this thread.

Note: These instructions look fairly straightforward. [http://www.howtoforge.com/arch-linux-mailserver-with- postfix...](http://www.howtoforge.com/arch-linux-mailserver-with-postfix-and- dovecot)

<comment><USER90> Running out of the home may be seem a bit asinine but the home is still somewhat sacred with respect to search warrants in the US and moving email around is insanely fast if you work out of the home.

Of course you'll likely need a business class connection with static IP and configurable rDNS and no port 25 block so not everyone will be lucky enough to be able to do it. But something like a plug computer will keep the cost pretty reasonable if you don't currently have a home server and for me it's cheaper than a VPS + consumer cable connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> i tried running my own mail server for a while. it's mostly tedious, but there was some settings and configs to poke at. the problem is that playing with configs and live mail servers don't go together so well, half the time my email server was down and mail wasn't getting through because i was playing with things that shouldn't be played with.

so now i use gmail. no matter how much i try to screw that up, my mail still comes through.

</comment><comment><USER93> Maybe I wasn't a self-respecting hacker when I first signed up for Gmail.

I prefer to not risk missing emails (from switching addresses to non-Gmail) me over the "hacker way".

</comment><comment><USER94> > Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk,

As a self-respecting hacker, I was able to put in a 'getmail_fetch` call to my crontab.

</comment><comment><USER95> I use my own server for personal mail, and gmail for mailing lists and a backup address. I'd show up as a non-self-respecting hacker to the OP.

</comment><comment><USER96> Whatever people may say, I run my own mail server on my DSL line at home (static ip), on a regular cheap PC. It's also the gateway, web server and a few things like that - since 2000.

It's currently running Dovecot, Postfixc, Roundcube, MySQL (even thus I plan to switch to PostgreSQL since, 10 years, but I'm lazy :P), amavisd-new, spamassassin. It's setup with SPF records and DKIM. I used to have grey listing as well, but I turned that off a year ago.

I have several emails, and friends, family also, hosted there.

* Spam: The "spam advantage" from Google's gmail makes me smile. I get less spam on my accounts, even the ones for which I post my email everywhere, than on my gmail account (which I never use anywhere, or even use for mail - its just my Google account - so its been guessed or used through OpenID, or Google leaked it somehow). Even with grey listing off.

Some guys seems happy with their 2 spam a month on Gmail. Well I get zero spam a month. And I almost never have false positive either (happened maybe 5 times in 12 years? and those were very spam-looking emails from automated services which i actually wanted to read)

* Maintenance: That makes me smile as well. Sure, I update the server every month or so. It's a 10min task. Stuff don't break. And yes, I know my stuff also, which helps. Backups are done via duplicity to a friend's system, and to a separate drive (had to switch the drives once)

Mail stay alive 5 days if box goes down. 12 years, did get network outages sometimes, never lost a mail. Not one. Sometimes, Ive friends with similar servers and we MX each others for safety, but that was not necessary up to now, because its never been down longer than a day (again its always "network outage" or "power outage" kind of issues).

* Interface. Well, I can understand it, but I don't care. Why? Because I very rarely use the web interface. I use IMAP clients and ssh+IMAP (mutt). Sometimes, I do use the web interface, and RoundCube is actually very decently good, even if its not super complete. It's fast and enjoyable at least.

* Domains refusing to talk to me Well, this has happened sometimes in the past. I sent requests for white list, and it got granted 99% of the time (in fact, its been only denied by trendnet). When denied I set the transport to use my ISP's SMTP. I haven't had to change those settings or make request in the last past 5 years or so. Again, its a much smaller deal than what you're lead to think.

</comment><comment><USER97> I'm a self-respecting hacker and I use Yahoo mail. I guess this would put me even lower in author eyes.

It's just convenient (where I can access the Web I can access my email, no spam). As long as I am aware of the that fact, I can encrypt my mail if necessary or use alternate means of communication (such as a different email service possibly my own, etc).

</comment><comment><USER98> To add to this article: Why do people not use PGP or S/MIME?

I've submitted my resume to a couple of people who posted in the Who's Hiring thread and checked for each of them if they have a PGP key submitted to the usual key servers (e.g. pgp.mit.edu). _None_ of them had done that. Beats me.

<comment><USER99> When I did use PGP and just signed my mail, people regularly asked about my garbled message (pgp/inline) or broken attachments (pgp/mime). So, fix everybodys email client first, please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> There is really no alternative. Set something up with the same features and I'll gladly pay to use it.

</comment><comment><USER101> I think I might switch over my email accounts, but there is also an issue of how long will these services be around for.

I had an Altavista account until they closed their email service. So, I need a reliable provider that wont be swallowed up by a bigger company and change my email address.

<comment><USER102> Get your own domain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Because it works, it's reliable, it's nice to use and it's another thing I don't need to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER104> I'd like to be off of Gmail, but I don't know of a good alternative. I'd pay a couple bucks a months for a viable Gmail replacement if I really trusted its security and reliability, and if the UI, keyboard shortcuts, feature-set etc. were just as good.

</comment><comment><USER105> In the UK you are legally responsible to save all mail forever (if you run your own mailserver), in case the police want to search it. For this reason alone I never use my own mailserver - my content is actually MORE deniable this way.

<comment><AUTHOR> According to Wikipedia that is wrong: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retenti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention#United_Kingdom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Roundcube is getting really good for running your own webmail <http://roundcube.net/screens>

<comment><USER99> What about Conversation View and Priority Inbox?

<comment><USER106> Roundcube can take plugins too - someone could write them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Because hackers want to work on interesting problems not ones that are solved for free by someone else.

</comment><comment><USER108> Because the word hacker isn't a badge of honor.

</comment><comment><USER109> ".. sites like sourceforge ..."

articles showing its age

</comment><comment><USER110> One word: Spam

</comment><comment><USER111> Why don't all people make their own food?

The same argument applies to almost any category of product, with varying ramifications unique to each.

If I made my own soda, I'd leave out high fructose corn syrup. Why do I let Coca Cola poison me? And so on and so forth.

<comment><USER112> > Why don't all people make their own food?

I do not think that this is a valid comparison.

It would be more like, why don't farmers produce their own food (and rely on packaged food instead).

<comment><USER113> Most farmers don't produce most of their own food.

The modern world is built on specialization: most farmers have specialized in some direction or another, and the ones who haven't usually make less money. At best, a farmer with livestock will occasionally take a pig or cow off to be butchered (since butchering is another specialty entirely, needing specialized equipment to do well), or a farmer growing corn will plant a few rows of sweet corn in a field near his house, or a farmer growing produce -- usually just a half dozen varieties -- will keep back a little for himself.

But the calories a farmer will produce for himself are generally a small part of his intake. In the end, it's a better use of his time to focus on producing as much of a handful of crops as possible and buy what he needs from a grocery like the rest of us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> Because we could fu __*n care less about what web mail provider we use, and Gmail is comfortable enough.</comment>


News from the Front (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html <comment><USER2> When asked what they most regret, old people consistently say they regret not having more experiences and following their heart. Maybe for some people that experience is wrapped up in university but I bet for a lot of people it's not.

I don't regret going to university but I regret not being more open to the alternatives which exist, existed.</comment>


"Political" Maps are Missing from Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.41latitude.com/post/481084008/political-maps-on-google-maps

<comment> barry-cotter 1\. My God those political maps are ugly

2\. So, how're you going to classify Kashmir, Gaza, Taiwan and Western Sahara?

If you want the Italian capital google it normally, not in Maps. Including political information is a complete pain in the arse for any company with global reach, for practically no benefit. If you really want it that badly build a mash-up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we read two different posts.

"Including political information is a complete pain in the arse for any company with global reach, for practically no benefit."

All the post asked was for capitals and city/township/county borders to be added to the maps. I'm not really sure what's so complicated about that.

Also, Kashmir, Gaza, Taiwan, and Western Sahara are already on Google Maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> ...legislative district, special districts, school districts...actually a good idea, but you'd need to be able to toggle which boundaries you wanted to see or it would be a mess.

It's just not enough "mass market" appeal to be on the primary menu of Google maps. The primary use of maps is to get oriented in an area and see where physical locations are, hence "Map", "Satellite", "Terrain".</comment>


Show HN: Tracking stock trading by US Senators - <AUTHOR> https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/senatetrading <comment><USER2> There have been two big Show HN threads about this project already:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848779)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22728049)

The purpose of Show HN is to share and discuss what one has built. It's not in that spirit to keep returning to the well with new and sensational instantiations of the same thing.

Also, deleting and reposting, which has been happening here, breaks the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

</comment><comment><USER3> Similar to [https://senatestockwatcher.com](https://senatestockwatcher.com), posted on HN last month:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22834524)

Same data source?

</comment><comment><USER4> Recommendation: Show the returns for each senator with the S&P 500 and Berkshire Hathaway performance as reference lines.

I'd be interested to see the senators who have a better track record than Buffett while in office.

<comment><USER5> Better returns alone aren't indicative of out-performance. What you would want to look at instead of returns is the Sharpe ratio of Hathaway and the market vs each senator. The Sharpe ratio is the excess return (return minus the risk free rate, usually the yield on a 3 month T-note), divided by the volatility of the excess return.

Another metric to look at would be each senators beta exposure and their R2: what percent of their returns are generated by their market exposure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please don't mess with the browser default scrollbar (in my case, the scrollbar is not visible and page content gets cut off). Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is more list of each stock transaction by a US senator by date.

I would show all of the senators line by line sort by name with a summary of: how many transactions,total min-to max, last updated, party.

Clicking on the senator would show all transactions by date for that person.

Right now it's more of a data dump.

<comment><USER8> Here, I made a quick dump of this data pivoted by Senator/Date/Side into Perspective, a wasm pivot-table project I work on:

[https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/8fe1596e298720dff9e1051668e240ce](https://bl.ocks.org/texodus/8fe1596e298720dff9e1051668e240ce)

<comment><USER9> Kelly Loeffler clearly does hft part-time

<comment><USER10> More like he's doing pretty big orders (i.e. ICE bought at high $20m volume)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like the data may be coming from [https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/](https://efdsearch.senate.gov/search/home/)

IANAL but I'd tread carefully given the language around not being used for commercial purposes

<comment><USER12> How exactly can the SEC prove that someone used that site for commercial purposes?

<comment><USER11> Again definitely not a lawyer but I'd imagine advertising an ETF or selling a subscription to an email list based on these trades (both ideas from this thread) would be pretty clear violations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Fun" idea. Would love to see an ETF based around this too.

<comment><USER14> A Democrat and a Republican ETF? See which one performs better?

<comment><USER13> My hypothesis is that you'd see identical performance, but I'm a cynic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A party marker (Dem/Rep/Ind) would have been useful. Also not having a scroll bar feels strange. Also does it include purchases made through mutual funds?

<comment><USER16> Filters by all of the different fields would be useful, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure this also includes stock trades _on behalf of_ senators, so also includes those carried out by a trust, not under the control of the senators themselves. I feel the data isn't useful unless it's clear which senators are making their own trading decisions, and which aren't

<comment><USER18> Is this completely impossible to track in practice? I would imagine so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Where does this data come from?

</comment><comment><USER20> How /where does one get the data source?

<comment><USER21> Seconding this question. Setting a Cron job to email daily and weekly stock changes would be fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hey, I built something similar to this for large options/insider movements.

[https://unusualwhales.com](https://unusualwhales.com)

Here's the twitter, [https://twitter.com/unusual_whales](https://twitter.com/unusual_whales)

</comment><comment><USER23> Very cool. Where is the data coming from?

</comment><comment><USER24> nit: clicking on the date column sorts alphabetically on the text of the date, which is not useful. I am aware the default state is sorted in reverse chronological order by date, but it is not possible to go back to this state after sorting on any column.

</comment><comment><USER25> How do trades get mapped back to individuals? Is this possible for anyone's trades?

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought senators used blind trusts. I guess some don't?

<comment><USER25> I don't think they're required to. It's a sign of trust if a politician places their personal business interests into blind trusts but many like Trump haven't. Legislators are, however, exempt from some portion of insider trading laws.</comment></comment>


1903 Parrot Academy That Taught Birds to Speak Using Phonographs - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/parrot-academy-philadelphia-1903 <comment><USER2> This reminds me of Alex the Parrot [1], an animal that ostensibly learned to use the language, not just mimic language sounds (though that conclusion is disputed). Would it be crazy to imagine schools to teach parrots how to use language, like Alex, and then be able to actually communicate with many members of another species?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parrot%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_%28parrot%29)

<comment><USER3> I feel like that wouldn't fit with humanity's ego-centric notion that we are special somehow, and spoken language is one of those things that qualifies us as "special". We've had some results teaching gorillas and chimpanzees sign language: [http://www.koko.org/sign-language](http://www.koko.org/sign- language). That hasn't changed much either. I think it would be neat though!</comment></comment>


Mozilla rips off Metalab, issue apparently resolved within the hour - <AUTHOR> http://blog.metalabdesign.com/post/437932602/metalab-goes-open-source

<comment><USER3> I think this is a gross, misleading, and irresponsible reaction. The cited image is from the Mozilla wiki under a section entitled "Current mock-ups and screenshots". I cannot find any evidence that Mozilla has released a site or application with this UI. There is nothing anywhere to indicate that the design shown is "new", that it is in any way intended to be the final design, or that the stolen graphical elements will actually be used in the real product.

<comment><USER4> Really? Because it looks to me like an employee of Mozilla claimed copyright on images plagiarized from another's work. The Mozilla wiki has a very clear copyright policy:

"All contributions to MozillaWiki are under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA) version 3.0 or any later version."

<https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozillaWiki:About>

Which I would expect Mozilla employees to know about and abide by.

As full disclosure, I've hired Metalab in the past.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but the appropriate reaction was to talk to anyone at Mozilla before writing a public blog post in a fairly transparent attempt to get some free PR.

<comment><USER6> Ahem, I appreciate that Mozilla is on the side of the angels and all, but after you create one of the most notable pieces of software in the world, take eight figures a year from Google for advertising, and zealously protect your own trademarks, you cease to get my "Oh, small company doesn't understand how IP works -- well, time for a quick private chitchat to rectify their understanding" latitude with regards to infringement.

P.S. Contrast this with how we collectively reacted when a Microsoft partner ripped off Plurk's design.

<comment><USER7> Apples and oranges. Plurk's entire UI, code and all, was stolen and launched as a competing product.

<comment><USER8> And if nothing was said, do you think that Mozilla would have made their own design up or simply continued with the stolen one?

<comment><USER9> Apparently, they had already ditched the design. [[http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/metalab-accuses-mozilla- of-...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/metalab-accuses-mozilla-of- plagiarizing-its-design/)]

<comment><USER8> It could very well be that I'm tired and missing something, but I don't see where it says that in the TC article. And I don't personally run Firefox, so I can't go through the pages of designs on the page linked to in the TC quote to verify this myself.

<comment><USER9> FTA (emphasis mine): Mozilla is now aware of a post by MetaLab that shows a Mozilla developer copying prior design work. The mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, _never final designs_. Mozilla respects the hard work of all designers and at no time meant to plagiarize original content. The in-progress designs for the Jetpack SDK's IDE are available here and following initial sign-off on the proof of concept, the IDE was developed entirely independent of MetaLabs' work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Andrew Wilkinson is constantly freaking out over design similarities and rip offs. In some cases, the designs are not even close. In others, such as in this case, they are very close. In either case, I don't think that these constant public tantrums are ever effective at accomplishing anything positive.

What Andrew _did_ accomplish in this case was that he ensured that Mozilla will likely not become one of their clients, even though it was clear Mozilla considered them to be a good firm, and would have possibly sent them work in the future.

The professional thing to do in this scenario would be to contact the parties involved to see what is going on and discuss the issue, including any concerns you have, directly and like adults. It's wrong to assume you understand someone's motivations when you haven't given them an opportunity to explain themselves, especially when you go on to type up a scathing blog post about them _in which you publish private e-mail correspondence_ between yourself and the party that you are criticizing.

<comment><USER11> Weird assumption - that Mozilla liked them and would have given them work in the future if he would not have complained. Though, I agree that it probably could have been resolved out of the public's view.

<comment><USER10> Why is it a weird assumption? Their blog post shows an e-mail from Daniel (the person they are lambasting) that says " _Your company has first-class UI/graphics design chops and I will certainly keep MetaLab in mind when bidding out future projects that require such services._ "

<comment><USER12> Don't take that at face value. It's standard corp-speak boilerplate. All it means is Mozilla wasn't burning bridges with the rejection.

<comment><USER10> Boilerplate perhaps, but generally if a company is willing to rip off your designs for use in their own internal concepts, I would take that as a sign that they like what you are doing.

<comment><USER13> Why wouldn't they just rip it again? :)

I mean, I think this whole thing is stupid, but if they've shown they'll do it once, what's to stop from doing it again? Why would they hire you after that?

The whole scenario is just weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is now on TechCrunch.

This should be a wake up call to MetaLab's prospective clients and partners: If you do something that MetaLab doesn't like, they won't call you to talk about it. They will first hit Twitter and their blog and try to shame you in the most public way they possibly can, ensuring that the message is broadcast to millions.

<comment><USER14> "something MetaLab doesn't like"? That's a really soft euphemism to use in place of "use their images and design on mockups of a product after rejecting their bid to do images and design for that product".

Granted, MetaLab could have chosen a better approach. But don't act like they don't have darn good reason to be upset.

<comment><USER10> My argument isn't that they shouldn't be upset. It's that they have handled a situation so poorly that their actions and consequences are worse than what they are originally critiquing!

Mozilla made a mistake by posting images that they shouldn't have posted. If they wanted that design, they should have coughed up the cash and gotten MetaLab to do the work. But publicly shaming a company to try and damage their reputation, including posting private e-mails for the world to see without so much as a courtesy call to the person you have a problem before you distribute a message which may reach hundreds of thousands, or millions of eyes is, at best, horribly short sighted and extraordinarily unprofessional.

<comment><USER15> So posting someones work you did not pay for in public and using for promotion is ok, complaining about that in public is not ok? Strange world, indeed.

<comment><USER16> If the claims you were making were true you might have a point. Unfortunately, it does not appear the facts are on your side.

<comment><USER17> How are his claims not true? Mozilla posted Metalab's designs on a public wiki page and used them for promotion - after rejecting the design (ie. not paying for it). If you don't want to pay for it, don't use it. That's pretty straightforward ethical behaviour, I would've thought.

<comment><USER10> MetaLab did no work for Mozilla beyond giving them an estimate for work to be completed. The concept drawing the Mozilla mistakenly posted on their wiki was, by all accounts, a concept that was produced internally at Mozilla.

<comment><USER18> An estimate that Mozilla _rejected_ before using the design they were unwilling to pay for.

EDIT: If I were MetaLabs, I would not be horrified at the prospect that people perfectly willing to rip me off would be reluctant to hire me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See here for four more comps based on the same layout: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/FlightDeck>

This is pretty shameful. These were all posted by wiki user Dandonkulous (Daniel Buechner; @dandonkulous), who was Metalab's contact in the article. These may just be comps rather than a full product, but regardless, they demonstrate that significant effort has gone into producing a nearly identical copy of the original Metalab design. That's disappointing; if these allegations are correct, I'm very disappointed in Daniel and those involved at Mozilla in creating this product.

 _Update:_ Mozilla has removed the screenshots. Here are three of them:

\- <http://u.phoreo.com/gn.png>

\- <http://u.phoreo.com/1x.png>

\- <http://u.phoreo.com/gq.png>

<comment><USER14> Within minutes of your post, the screenshots were removed from that page. Looks like someone on the mozilla end is watching.

You can still see a screenshot at <https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:FlightDeck_Editor.png> as of this posting.

To the guys at mozilla: do the right thing. It's too late to bury this.

<comment><USER20> Aside from the rights and wrongs done by both companies, ^^ _this_ sentiment is the one that really makes me mad. Mozilla gets notification from a company that they screwed up. Mozilla begins removing the objectionable material without delay. Mozilla gets flamed for "burying evidence".

I imagine this flame can't hurt as bad as the alternate one where people say Mozilla is just flaunting their wrongdoing by not taking the material down, but sheesh!

<comment><USER14> The issue had already gone public. The guys at Mozilla had a choice. They could either remove the material and play dumb, or remove the material, acknowledge the issue, and work with MetaLabs to find a satisfactory solution. At issue was not "removing the objectionable material", but "removing the material without any acknowledgment".

I find it surprising you would consider my call to Mozilla to "do the right thing" a flame. There was no anger or malice in anything I said, just a desire for someone at Mozilla to say "we are working with MetaLabs to sort out this issue". (I say all of this as a supporter of Mozilla, and a long-time user of the Mosaic-Netscape-Firefox browsers.)

<comment><USER10> How do you know with any degree of certainty that Mozilla was "playing dumb" and not just taking down the material as a pre-emptive measure to try and fix the situation? Do you work at MetaLab or Mozilla?

<comment><USER14> I did not say that they were playing dumb.

I said they had a choice, and urged them to make the right one.

Until MetaLabs finally communicated what had happened, the scenario was ambiguous. IMO, Mozilla could have eliminated the ambiguity much sooner simply by saying "we are working with MetaLabs to resolve this."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's the comment Mozilla gave to me:

"Mozilla is now aware of a post by MetaLabs that shows a Mozilla developer copying prior design work. The mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, never final designs. Mozilla respects the hard work of all designers and at no time meant to plagiarize original content. The in-progress designs for the Jetpack SDK's IDE are available here (<http://flightdeck.zalewa.info/>) and following initial sign-off on the proof of concept, the IDE was developed entirely independent of MetaLabs' work."

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm from the looks of it it doesn't seem like they're actually using the design anywhere? As far as I can tell the image from Metalab has been placed on a public wiki.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did MetaLab design the Campaign Monitor website?

<http://www.getballpark.com/> <http://www.campaignmonitor.com/>

<comment><USER23> They look awfully similar, but no; Campaign Monitor's site was designed by design firm 31Three before Ballpark was launched:

<http://www.31three.com/portfolio/#campaign_monitor>

[http://newism.com.au/blog/post/90/building-campaign- monitor-...](http://newism.com.au/blog/post/90/building-campaign-monitor- part-3-design-process/)

<comment><USER10> Maybe this 31Three company needs to put up a blog post accusing MetaLab of "ripping off" their design. They could even put up comparative screenshots to show the obvious similarities, and could encourage their followers to contact MetaLab to register their displeasure. The directors of the company could also spend the day on Twitter publicly forwarding links to the blog post to their colleagues.

Seems like a great way to get some free publicity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I first saw the tweet I thought it was just a backyard/bedroom operator doing it for free. It is open source after all. But when I read that they tendered for the project and were turned down, that makes me really angry.

I hope they reach an agreement where Metalab is reimbursed for the entire amount of their initial quote.

<comment><USER25> > an agreement where Metalab is reimbursed for the entire amount of their > initial quote.

Why on earth would/should that happen over a few mockups? It's not that Mozilla asked Metalab to do a bunch of work, claimed it sucked so they wouldn't pay, and then used it anyway. No: Moz decided not to hire Metalab, and someone ripped off some existing work of Metalab's for some mockups.

Now, I think that was an inexcusable thing to do on the part of whoever did it, but even if it was actual Mozilla staff, I just don't see why Mozilla ought to pay Metalab for not working nor hire them unless they happened to be the second choice. (Because the first choice--assuming they were responsible-- has got to go.)

<comment><USER24> Because the person responsible (not knowing who that is just yet) directly stole their images, violated their copyright and their intellectual property. Instead of tying things up with lawyers, mediation and strongly worded letters, why not simply pay what was quoted for, and forget it ever happened?

<comment><USER10> When you talk about lawyers and strongly worded letters, are you talking about MetaLab suing Mozilla over copyright issues, or are you talking about Mozilla suing MetaLab for trying to damage their reputation? And what about Daniel? Doesn't he have a reasonable expectation to privacy? I'm assuming he didn't give MetaLab permission to post his private correspondence with them on their website.

<comment><USER26> Yes.

(By which I mean that a settlement offer along the lines suggested is part of how to avoid the kind of tangle you describe.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is probably the mock-up that almost landed you the gig in the first place, but obviously that isn't going to happen now.

And you've undoubtedly convinced a few additional CEO's that absolute secrecy is the best way to operate. Let people participate in works-in-progress and someone is sure to get their knickers in a twist. This is also why more companies don't open source their tools: they expose themselves to patent infringement suits when anyone can read the code.

The proper recourse would be to email someone, or wait to see if your designs showed up in the final product. I mean, you aren't going to forget to check the theme on the latest version of Firefox.

<comment><USER18> _"but obviously that isn't going to happen now."_

It hadn't happened. The deal was off.

Why do people try to convince designers that they should accept being ripped off in hopes that some of the people ripping them off will throw them a bone?

<comment><USER27> _Why do people try to convince designers that they should accept being ripped off in hopes that some of the people ripping them off will throw them a bone?_

You are talking about an internal mockup, not a released product. There is no justification to say that anyone was "ripped off", nor would Mozilla be "throwing them a bone" if they were to re-approach later after re-allocating more funding. My comment that this will not happen now is not to suggest that MetaLab should have been secretly hoping for a deal to happen anyway. However, their untempered response to the situation portray's them as unprofessional. I would not reconsider working with a firm who acted this way.

<comment><USER18> _"You are talking about an internal mockup, not a released product."_

I am talking about design work they used for promotional videos and screenshots. It matters in absolutely no way that upon this becoming public, Mozilla announced that they do not intend to use the design for production software.

 _"I would not reconsider working with a firm who acted this way."_

I would not want a _client_ who's hesitant to hire me on the grounds that they might not get away with ripping me off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> azaaza just posted to twitter

"Just got off the phone with MetaLab, glad to have quickly reached an understanding. Expect to hear from them soon."

<http://twitter.com/azaaza/status/10253138540>

seems a shame for metalab to jump so quickly on mozilla in that way, mozilla havent been the golden boy in the geek crowd for a while but their labs are putting out some awesome stuff.

<comment><USER18> Seems more of a shame for Mozilla to have done this, even by simple negligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm late to this, and I wish I could avoid the gross generalization, but it seems that Hacker News has a bias against Metalab.

The comments on You're Killing Me, Zappos (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812729>) could be boiled down to "You can design a shiny mockup, but you can't make a successful, money-making website."

</comment><comment><USER30> <http://twitter.com/azaaza/status/10253138540>

Aza: Just got off the phone with MetaLab, glad to have quickly reached an understanding. Expect to hear from them soon.

</comment><comment><USER31> Apparently Mozilla liked Metalab design so much that it was getting ready to actually use it in their product. Price happened to be too steep so they passed.

What Metalab should do is that it should contact Mozilla and tell them: "Look guys, we saw that you put much effort and actually introduced our design into development version of your product. We think it really looks great so maybe you should reconsider and purchase this design from us. We can give you discount on this."

Instead they went "This is mine. You have not paid to touch it. Don't touch it! Hey, everybody!!! They are touching it but they didn't pay me!"

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I know that price tag says $199.99, but since you walked out of the store with it stuffed in your pocket, I know you like it - how's $180? $160?

Hey, don't walk so fast, I'm trying to negotiate with you. Wait up!

<comment><USER31> From what I see is more like:

Why do you touch my apples? You said you didn't want to buy them for 10$! Stop touching my apples! Thief! Thief! Make him stop touching my apples!

Or maybe fitting the dress you said you didn't want to buy would be a better metaphore.

<comment><USER18> Except, of course, I already took the apples home.

 _Yesterday._

(Or in Mozilla's case, three months prior.)

I get that folks love Mozilla and don't like MetaLab, but the contortions people are going through to try to paint them as wrong or stupid on this issue are headache-inducing. I wish people would just honestly say, "I don't care that Mozilla ripped off MetaLab."

<comment><USER31> I can't force myself to think about the design as an item that comes in a opaque box with price tag. You have to try if design fits. If it fits you keep it, pay for it and everyone is happy. If not, you don't pay for it and toss it away what apparently Mozilla did. Same thing you do with photographs. You try many of them, but buy only the ones that go into final design. I wonder if MetaLab pays for all the photos that go through its designers hands.

There are some screenshot that prove that at some point that design was tried to be fitted. That's all. Not that Mozilla took design home and unboxed it without paying.

<comment><USER18> _"If not, you don't pay for it and toss it away what apparently Mozilla did."_

They did _not_ toss it away, which is the whole point. They used it in public material.

That you can't "force" yourself to think in terms of accepting or declining agreements is an issue you might look into; I have nothing further to add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Im interested in what Mozilla mean by: _"the mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, never final designs."_ (mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

According to the wiki history [1] they were added as late as 12th/16th Feb 2010. Admitedly posted as _Latest Mock-ups and Screenshots_ but there are no other designs or alternatives proposed.

It's easy enough to call these concepts now: but without a complaint from metalab (which was handled poorly) would they have made it further towards "final design"?

1\. [https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Labs/Jetpack/Flight...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Labs/Jetpack/FlightDeck&diff=202663&oldid=201751)

</comment><comment><USER33> For Mozilla's sake, I hope it was the design team they hired that did the knockoff rather than an inhouse designer. Although it's probably too early to jump to conclusions at this point.

<comment><USER17> If they did, how would they know which site to knock off? Unless it's either a bizarre coincidence, the Mozilla guys would have had to pass the mockups on to them. And they still had to upload them afterwards!

<comment><USER33> I'm sure there were more than a few designers who tendered an offer.

<comment><USER17> But a strange coincidence that they just happened to pick Metalab's design to rip off, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can anyone deblur that invoice? It looks like at least $20k for 47 hours of work.

<comment><USER35> Er, it's blatantly clear that there is only one number in front of the comma separating the thousands. It looks like $6,000 to me.

<comment><USER36> $6580 / 47 = $140. Sounds about right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remain amused/disturbed that so many people here sincerely believe that if they wrong someone else, the wronged party _owes_ them a back-channel discussion to resolve things cheaply and quietly.

If you make promo material with someone's designs (after declining to pay), you should be very grateful if that person's willing to work it out without involving lawyers. A public apology and a promise to do things better is far cheaper than an attorney's billable hours.

If that person is kind enough to do all this quietly, then be _twice_ as grateful for that person's kindness.

Mozilla and Aza Raskin have understood this better than their defenders - <USER2> you're in the hole, stop digging. No excuses, no defensiveness. Fix your mistake, acknowledge that you were wrong, explain your error if it was innocent, and apologize.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone know what software they to make/send their estimates? As well as the CRM they use? The message screenshot I take is from some CRM tool?

Edit: Looks to be ballpark for both, can anyone confirm?

<comment><USER38> Both of the shots (estimate + 'CRM' - really just a comments section) are from Ballpark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Jetpack Mockup Clarification & Apology to MetaLab

[http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/03/10/jetpack-mockup- cla...](http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/03/10/jetpack-mockup- clarification-apology-to-metalab/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Their homepage now redirects to <http://blog.metalabdesign.com> and rest of the nav links are not working anymore. Good job, make your website completely unusable for a bit of PR.

<comment><USER41> They were TechCrunch'd and threw a static page up on S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow. This is disgusting. Even I create my own content and o own a small social network (2780 members). Unnacceptable. I'm speechless. <http://www.thirdie.com>

</comment><comment><USER43> MetaLabs propose a design for Mozilla. Mozilla steals design. NOT COOL especially since you have the resources to afford something like this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> edited the title, kudos to the Mozilla team for their quick work in getting the story straight

</comment><comment><USER44> Wait, was this an actual site that was live, or just some screenshots/mockups?

<comment><USER45> It was just a mockup.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The material was used in both the launch announcement and video for the product, but the design has since been changed. Mozilla have apologised. A follow-up post from MetaLab is promised for tomorrow."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> What app are they using to read their mail? It's purty

<comment><USER38> I believe what you're referring to is the image of the estimate. That's a screenshot of MetaLab's invoicing app, Ballpark.

<http://getballpark.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I love Metalabs site design as much as the next guy, but I don't think that this is what Picasso meant when he said - "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Shame on you Mozilla, shame on you.

</comment><comment><USER48> good artists copy, great artists steal :)

</comment><comment><USER49> "That said, it was used in their launch video as well as their blog post announcing the product."

If true, I think that's pretty conclusive that this goes beyond Mozilla "mocking up" a new design and they've got some egg on their face.

</comment><comment><USER50> The Metalab guys should be happy about all the free press they are now getting.

Not saying that Metalab did this, but I wonder if there is a PR lesson here. Anonymously upload your companies design to a popular FOSS project and then pretend to be all dejected when you 'find out'. Air your grievance publicly and boom, instant PR!

</comment><comment><USER51> This situation smears the good name that Mozilla has built in spreading the values of open source software. It is shameful for Mozilla to have put itself as a pilferer of design. Take it down and hire them to do the work.

</comment><comment><USER52> There's a reason why everyone calls the Mozilla Foundation the "MoFo". This is the same entity that told Debian they couldn't patch security problems and still call the browser Firefox. Let's just say... a clue is not something the MoFo has.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can't believe Mozilla would do such a thing, but as a designer I am on Metalab's side, it is unacceptable that any company would do such a thing. Mozilla needs to issue an apology and pay for the design if the intend to clear in any way what they have done. It is also sad that a talented team like mozilla's couldn't come up with an idea of their own or at least pay for it. On another note, is there a way for Metalab to take legal actions towards Mozilla?</comment>


Looking for a technical co-founder (interests in AI, ML, NLP),interested anyone? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a technical co-founder who has great @ technology and subject areas like AI, ML, NLP, etc.I am a part of an incubator program and looking at building a recommendation system powered e-commerce platform.Please reach out to me on on my twitter handle @rohi81. <comment><USER2> Im working on it, maybe this could be the solution, please make an opinion :) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919173></comment>


Supercharging Vim: Blazing Fast Search and Global Replace · Matt Layman - <AUTHOR> https://www.mattlayman.com/blog/2019/supercharging-vim-blazing-fast-search/ <comment><USER2> Found your blog through Google News but came looking for a place to leave comments and found you here!

Thanks for this! I've been using ripgrep in vim for awhile but `quickfix- reflector` is awesome! Thanks for introducing me to it!</comment>


Ask HN: How to disable new Google search styling - <AUTHOR>

I personally find the new google look without underlines and massive text to be rubbish, I gave it a go, but it's hard to scan and the design looks amateurish. What is it with designers constantly trying to get rid of link underlines?
Previously whenever it reared its head, I simply deleted cookies to get rid of it but now it is stubbornly sticking around.
Anyone know how to get rid of it quickly without having to install anything? I have many Chromes/profiles for testing/businesses/etc. so extensions just turn into a massive pita. <comment><USER2> > but it's hard to scan and the design looks amateurish

What about Hacker News' design? I guess everybody agrees it's ugly, but it gets the job done. I think your just being over-picky for nothing.

I actually find the new design to be more pleasing to the eye and a lot cleaner. And my search results are still as good as before, so who cares.

</comment><comment><USER3> The new redesign also breaks the "Personal Blocklist" Chrome extension by Google. The text overlaps with the first line after the link.

I was able to get rid of the new styling by doing incognito mode. If I'm logged in to either my gmail or google apps account I get the redesign.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm usually a Google-redesign apologist, but this new change is pretty jarring. I'm not sure what they're trying to achieve by removing the underlines.

I'm sure someone will come up with a Greasemonkey script soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER5> The font and underlining change are a non issue for me (other than looking terrible in chrome for windows); however the increased font size is jarring and reduces the amount of information that can quickly be scanned.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you are using Firefox, try Stylish, they have a massive user created database at: [http://userstyles.org/](http://userstyles.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Try disabling JavaScript. I just did a quick test and that seemed to work. But then you lose "advantages" such as search suggestions. I don't care, I hate those suggestions anyway.</comment>