We are three clicks away from an "oh shit" moment for the web - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dherman76/we-are-three-clicks-away-from-an-oh-shit-moment-for-the-web-63567c2b8e5e

<comment><USER2> _Do we push brands and their agencies to do "better" ads? Do we push publishers and ad-tech to make less-intrusive ads?_

Yes. This would be the polite, adult thing to do.

 _Do we take half a percent of every ad budget in 2016 and do a PSA campaign to educate users about the content they consume?_

'Hi. I'm an ad man, and I'd like to stop lying for a moment and talk about something serious - my ongoing need for a high income. You see folks, those shows you like cost a lot of money to put together. In an ideal world we would just show you commercial messages all the time and you could pick and choose which ones to slavishly obey. But we know all that decision-making gets tiring and tedious, and that many of you would rather read a book or have sex or something, which means you're not taking part in the economy. So in the goodness of our heart, we gave you shows and characters and entertainments to give you enjoyable little rest periods in between the hard work of being a consumer. The only problem is, you've started treating these programs as an end in themselves instead of our little gift to help you watch our important commercial messages. Now we find you don't want ads on the websites you mindlessly click around either. This is very selfish of you! Think of all the poor boys and girls who will be unable to get jobs providing goods and services if you go on lying on the couch like a beached whale with a remote control watching other people live meaningful lives on TV shows when you could be shopping. Think about it, you idle bastards.'</comment>


A fellow HN'er helped me find the missing weather balloon footage - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hartleybrody.com/found-balloon/

<comment><USER2> Landed 2.25 miles due west of an airport. "That said, I also took care to avoid airports and other airspace that might cause issues as the balloon was being launched. . . . I didn't want my balloon getting tangled with an airplane or causing any other issues."</comment>


In Q1 2018, ICOs Stall as Crypto Falls - <AUTHOR> https://news.crunchbase.com/news/q1-2018-icos-stall-crypto-falls/ <comment><USER2> Is this article from the future?

 _The first quarter of 2018 brought startling losses to the crypto market. Bitcoin has, according to Coindesk, toppled from its $19,343 December 16, 2017 high to $6,926 as of May 31, 2018_</comment>


Excellent analysis of US copyright law, suppressed within 24 hrs of publication - <AUTHOR> http://marylandpirates.com/wp-content/uploads/rsc_policy_brief_--_three_myths_about_copyright_law_and_where_to_start_to_fix_it_--_november_16_2012.pdf

<comment><USER2> That is a really good read, and very sane. So, obviously, it has to get pulled.</comment>


Startup Idea: The Best Way to Buy Furniture – Would You Use This?   - <AUTHOR> http://homehub.co

<comment><USER2> Oddly enough, last night I was hanging out online, decided to look at some furniture and noticed that browsing for furniture online still largely stinks. Consequently, I agree that you've found a problem in need of a solution.

Unfortunately, while I'm a big fan of browsing for furniture online, I wouldn't buy anything more substantial than a bookshelf online. I don't buy furniture terribly often, so when I do, I look for things that are going to last and that I won't regret in six months. Consequently, I like to see/touch the fabric, look at the stitching, and generally take a good look before I make a buying decision. So, while I'd traffic your site, I don't think you'd ever make any money off of me. I'm not one to tweet out links to products on shopping sites, or even like many things on Facebook, so to top it off, I'd be a viral dud. :)

However, I'm just one perspective and I may not be your target, so don't put extraordinary amounts of faith in my opinion. Congratulations for going this far, plus front paging Hacker News, and best of luck with your idea!

<comment><USER3> I'm actually somewhat similar. I'm moving relatively soon and was trying to find furniture but it's difficult to both find things and figure out how everything would fit together. I'm not worried so much about how long it'll last (other than general feel, I'm not sure I could tell) but it's generally not clear just how large the furniture would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I stopped reading at "baller", which is irrevocably linked in my head to the word "douchey". That's not a lot of feedback, but I hope it's helpful, since it's easy to change.

<comment><USER5> Yeah; but like the music in mall stores that appeal to youth, sometimes these things are filters to keep old farts out of the store.

<comment><USER6> The problem is its the old farts who think $2095 coffee tables are awesome, in comparison, for the kids at hot topic that might exceed 10% of their annual income so what they think is cool is not relevant.

If you're going to go class warfare and ageism, at least do it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reasons I would:

I might live in an area where furniture galleries are few and far between, and maybe I don't have a vehicle able to move anything larger than a small end table in the box.

I might have a friend whose place is completely decked out in furniture from these vendors, and she invites me over to a party, like tupperware or certain unmentionable things are sold.

You cater to a very specific group with high margin boutique furniture that is not available anywhere else but is nonetheless highly desirable.

Reasons I would not:

Furniture is like apparel and shoes; you can't describe an individual fit or feel over the internet all that well; that's why shopping malls stay in business and Amazon does much better selling coffee table books than coffee tables.

Try though you may, you would have to reach an economy of scale eclipsing a percentage of IKEA or Wal-mart to leverage the savings from not needing a physical showroom. IKEA thrives in spite of (and arguably because of) having really crappy delivery infrastructure, because non-crappy deliveries would blow anybody's margins.

What would really impress me is a self-assembling furniture kit, including 3-D printer/sewer, and all the raw materials to make it work. It may require a $10k deposit on a $40 chair, and require me to devote 6 hours of my labor, but I think that'd be an entertaining (and potentially quite profitable) alternative. Now to figure out how to make wood come out of a 3-D printer nozzle.

<comment><USER6> "It may require a $10k deposit on a $40 chair, and require me to devote 6 hours of my labor"

You might enjoy fine woodworking as a hobby.

I don't have the woodturning and wood carving gear to be able to spend 6 hours on a chair.

A large amount of time is spent in tool setup / teardown so I have built 3 bookcases in only about 10% more time than 1. This has some interesting implications for your dining room chair example, where it might be 6 hours to make one chair, but only 8 hours to make six chairs. Bolt together particle board kits usually scale much more linearly.

Extensive product evaluation leads me to estimate if you buy raw stock and cut it yourself you can upgrade about 1 to 2 levels of luxury. So buy a kit of particle board, or buy boards of solid clear oak, for the same cost. This is an issue for your proposed kit idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think you should help your prospective customers by creating a section for "Apartment-sized" furniture. Most furniture being sold today is still House- sized and/or designed for very large people. Geometry is everything. Also, it would be cool if you could aggregate offerings from small, independent furniture makers. I like it already. Keep going.

<comment><USER9> I think these are the way to go. If you aggregated small, independent furniture makers in addition to or instead of the large companies, it would differentiate you from your competition a lot better. Someone else mentioned that these brands you are using have pretty good online experiences; I think that's true, but that the smaller or regional guys don't.

There is some competition on the high end here from One King's Lane and others, but I also noticed that under the 'baller' section you still have the max cost at 2500. Custom or really beautiful furniture like Thomas Moser costs significantly more than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> First of all, well done on the website - it's natural to use and nicely formatted. If only there was a "baller" section at IKEA...

One thing I've thought of on my way home from IKEA trips getting furniture for my startup was how great it would be if there could be a better IKEA delivery service. Currently, they charge $100 to ship anything anywhere - hooking in per-mile shipping for a reasonable rate would be a lucrative way to eliminate the tedious task of buying furniture from a store. This doesn't necessarily have to be limited to IKEA - if you partnered up with an array of furniture stores, offered them on your website, and had a bootstrapped delivery service, this could become a really big thing.

But then again, adding in shipping is risky and would really only work when there is a critical mass on the website. Best of luck to you!

<comment><USER11> TaskRabbit is great for this if you live remotely near an IKEA. You can have the Rabbit act as a personal shopper, which gives you access to a much greater set of the catalog (many things aren't available online) while eliminating — in my opinion — the most painful part of the experience. As a bonus, you can often also pay them to assemble it.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for this awesome suggestion, I hadn't thought of using TaskRabbit and will try it out next time I get the chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> this is just a website with affiliate links to buy furniture, I don't understand how this is unique.

<comment><USER13> Hipmunk is just an affiliate site with link s to buy plane tickets. Mint is just an affiliate site with links to sign up for financial products. Pinterest is just an affiliate site...

<comment><USER14> Mint - offers a personal finance app for budgeting, planning, etc. -- and perhaps monetizes with affiliate links.

Hipmunk - meta searches multiple travel sites, provides ratings and reviews, assigns an overall experience metric, and supplies other actionable info for travelers.

Pinterest - allows discovery and sharing of content and other interaction (BTW, unless they recently restarted their affiliate-monetization scheme, they no longer are "just an affiliate". I have no idea though).

I'll grant you that at some level anything is "just" an _x_. I'll also grant you that the determination of value is frequently subjective (for instance, I never got the fanaticism around Pinterest).

But, there is some point at which the added functionality/feature set of a given thing is so thin that it is very difficult to see where any significant value is being added or that there is any uniqueness. Aggregating products from different retailers? That's been done in spades.

The other element, I think, is that HN has a different standard. Because its readership is very highly tech and startup oriented, people who show here generally have something that is at least somewhat more unique. So, I don't think it's overly harsh for a reader to comment that he/she doesn't see anything unique or particularly valuable in this offering. In fact, that's pretty good feedback. The affiliate world is brutal and if this is all they are bringing, then they are likely to find it extremely tough going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's useful. Last time I had to do furniture shopping, I had to keep going to a bunch of different sites to see who had what I wanted and what their price ranges were.

I also like the grouping of items based on cost range, as that was how I was primarily searching for stuff.

The only place it falls apart for me is in the ability to create a shopping cart. I may be in the minority, but when I was furniture shopping I was looking for a whole room or set of things. With this site, it's very easy to buy one thing, but when you want to buy 3 or 4 pieces it can become a bit of a hassle.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nope. Ain't got nothing that fits my taste.

It wasn't that long ago that I was looking for a coffee table; I browsed through the websites of several of the brands you're scraping and found absolutely nothing. I ended up wandering to the local Dania showroom and found this gorgeous thing made out of two pieces of glass cut into Googieish boomerang shapes, that was only like $250.

Then again I am pretty sure I'm not the typical furniture consumer; I'm an artist, who has very little furniture, and a very specific vision for what she wants her home to look like.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just recently got in the market for home furniture. Found it a bit of a mess. Something like this could be useful - effectively like hipmunk, but for furniture. i.e. make the experience of understanding your options and finding what you want easier.

I like it.

I also noticed you guys are up in Toronto (my original hometown). If you want more candid feedback from someone in the market for furniture, or if I can help with anything else silicon valley related (I live in SF). Let me know.

</comment><comment><USER18> I owned a furniture company for a little bit... So understand I am a furniture snob. West elm and restoration hardware are shit...

Baller should be

[http://www.hudsonfurnitureinc.com](http://www.hudsonfurnitureinc.com) [http://bocci.ca](http://bocci.ca) Herman Miller Skram Maybe even room and board.

Know the market better and you will have better success.

Other then that I think its a great start.

</comment><comment><USER19> The brands you've focused on already have great online shopping experiences. The regional and small independent furniture retailers could really benefit from something like this where they don't have the knowledge or time to focus on their online experience.

Also, have you seen the numbers on big ticket furniture items bought online? Check out Wayfair's data. They're incredibly low so I doubt you can make enough money just through affiliate programs.

</comment><comment><USER20> OT: Please disable the Olark sound. There are few things more annoying than a chat window that pops open on an unfocused-tab with a loud sound.

</comment><comment><USER21> No offence, but how is this a "startup" ? Seems like everything is a startup nowadays. You make an app - startup. You make a website - startup. It just seems it crawls known furniture websites and displays it in a nice way. Useful? Maybe. Is it a startup? I don't think so. But who knows, lately in HN everything is a startup and everyone is "hacking".

</comment><comment><USER22> As I am a cheapskate when it comes to this, I would use a service that lets me find furniture people want to get rid off and that I can get for free. Maybe the service could also add a cheap van for transportation and monetize this way. It's a win win, people usually don't like throwing their furniture and sometimes have to pay taxes for that too.

<comment><USER23> scrape the free section of craigslist for keywords of furniture you're looking to acquire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I actually think this idea is pretty great. I am currently in the market for a new chair, and have a specific style in mind, but have had trouble finding it just by going to stores. I also think browsing on Amazon is a terrible shopping experience. A simple place to find furniture from different retailers could be really useful.

</comment><comment><USER25> My wife, who used to work at Walter E. Smythe, has a very good eye for this sort of thing. I pointed her to the site and she said "yawn".

Admittedly, she has number of serious sites that she looks at regularly. Two of our most prized furniture possessions she scared up on Ebay.

</comment><comment><USER26> If your selection had some sort of curation/checking to ensure that items fit into correct categories, I'd totally use this to buy furniture. Having to scroll through endless websites of manufacturers, resellers, relabelers, etc is truly terrible.

<comment><USER27> I would say so too!

Buying furniture and fitting them into right category/color and also fitting them into the color/style of your apartment are no easy task.

It takes lots of effort, and does not seem to work at all.

The most annoying part of it is that, there are no good tool for a general public to actually easily use planning tool to design/shop furnitures.

Since good furnitures are mostly quite expensive, there should be a good market fit, and if this is done right, it could be a really nice thing.

Just being a e-commerce site might not be so cool. But giving the ability for the users to compare/design/see the real actions in real time will be the features I would like to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I noticed that [http://homehub.co/product/355](http://homehub.co/product/355) is in both the "budget" and "baller" categories. How are the items grouped? Otherwise, I like it.

</comment><comment> Jean-Philipe Like the idea, would use it, but it's hard for me to find furnitures that I really like. Especially I don't like the way most furnitures are constructed. If its construction not elegant, I don't find it's beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would use it. I don't like going to furniture places and trying to figure out what I want, so your website appeals to me. In fact, if this is still around in a few months when I furnish my apartment, I will use this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yes! This is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm in the process of buying furniture too. Another feature that I would love would be if I like a certain style, it would be awesome if you can suggest others like it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why does "moderate" coffee tables have many that are $2000+? It makes me lose confidence in the site, and it is broken. I won't want to use it, in case there are other errors, ie. billing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> I already use Houzz for something similar. Houzz lets me browse products by similar categories, but also lets me see how the product looks in actual rooms and has lots of social features.

</comment><comment><USER33> No, I would not.

It looks great, I might need something like this soon, and I can grit my teeth and carry on past the word "baller".

But I''m in the UK not USA.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just out of curiosity how does this work from a business perspective? If you're re-selling furniture from another company do you have to secure the ok with them first?

<comment><USER19> I'm assuming they're not re-selling anything. They're acting as a data aggregator to simplify the product search process to a single site. They then link to the site and, in the case of Amazon, they get money through affiliate programs. Had a similar idea for shoes. Didn't work very hard on it and only made a few pennies before I shut it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'd really like to be able to filter furniture and home items by dimension, so I can find things that fit my specific space.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would use a site like this to make a shortlist, but then I would go to the shop to try it - so that means 0 affiliate money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

What if we gave you an organization/collaboration feature where you could also save items you like, organize them by item type, tie them to a budget, collaborate with others to decide or get help with design. The idea, is that we are with you through every step of the process.

Would that make you more inclined to buy through us?

<comment><USER37> Not the GP, but I'd act the same way. Unfortunately, nothing that you can do online will make me buy through you. I'd need to see and try the furniture before buying.

Maybe you should focus on only presenting the furniture. That would make the site a kind of ad where selers pay to display their products. Or maybe you should just focus on people that are not like me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> i like [http://www.furniturenear.me](http://www.furniturenear.me) for this. found a coffee table thru them a month or so ago

</comment><comment><USER39> you did that thing to my back button that I hate. Other then that, the site looks good and "modern" :)</comment>


Writing 1/3 in binary (2014) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2014/12/17/writing-13-in-binary/ <comment><USER2> Loved seeing this video, just gotta quibble with this part of the blog post:

> "I think the fun of topics like this can draw kids into math …"

Nope, it can't! There is no generally applicable lesson about building math enthusiasm here! "The fun of topics like this" is only legible to kids who are already into math!

<comment><USER3> I'd have to agree here. Show this to a classroom of students and half wouldn't even give attention to an introduction.

<comment><USER4> I homeschooled my son in math and I found he was fascinated by the way repeating decimals formed cycles. I'm sure that this reinforced his skill at long division.

I think may be more fun to do than to watch somebody else do it.

<comment><USER5> In my experience some people just love numbers, myself included. I could spend all day looking at various patterns of prime numbers, server metrics, etc.

Other people just.... don't care numbers at all. Which is really disheartening when you find something really cool and everyone else doesn't even listen. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing how that kid went about that problem, seeing how interested he seems, makes me want to teach. It's impressive how natural the discussion was with the kid, the two were on exactly the same page throughout the entire discussion. This video doesn't really show that all kids can get this interested in math, but it does show that for the right kids, of which I suspect there are a substantial number, we can be teaching concepts much much earlier.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps an easier way would be to just do normal long division just in base 2.

<comment><USER8> An easier easier way:

      1/3   =   0.3333...   =      0.????...b
       *2   =   0.6666...   0 ->   0.0???...b
       *2   =   1.3333...   1 ->   0.01??...b
       -1   =   0.3333...
       *2   =   0.6666...   0 ->   0.010?...b
      etc.

<comment><USER9> This is insightful, but hard to read.

Essentially:

      1/3 * 4 = 4/3
      4/3 = 1 + 1/3

So, working backwards, our number can be more and more closely approximated by repeatedly adding 1 and dividing by 4 - or in binary, prepending a 1 and shifting two places right: 0.01010101...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flagging as I was redirected in Safari to a malware fake Flash download.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not redirected when I open it in Safari, FF, or Chrome.

<comment><USER10> I'm not getting it now either. Probably got hit with a rotten ad. Unflagged.

<comment><USER11> Same here, for what it's worth -- I got redirected to a fake antivirus download (also in Safari), but only on the first load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That guy knows how to teach.

<comment><USER13> He's a great dad. Gives me warm feelings

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I loved seeing the kid do this. When I was 12 my dad gave me math problems (including long division) in all sorts of bases (he started with hex, octal, and binary but went on to 3, 7, 27, etc). Sadly this was pre IEEE 754 -- I could really have benefitted from that!

</comment><comment><USER15> 1/11?

<comment><USER16> Exactly, I thought the same thing myself.

See, that wasn't so hard!!

I'll be here all week, try the lamb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this kid pursues a career in tech, he's going to crush his whiteboard interviews.</comment>


Dear Apple, please fix notifications - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco/dear-apple-please-fix-notifications-647fe26ff1c4 <comment><USER3> This smaller notification size would look pretty terrible on 4" devices like the iPhone SE. In fact, it already looks kind of terrible in the mockup provided.

IMO Apple is long overdue admitting that putting navigation buttons on the top bar was a mistake. Fine in the era of the original iPhone, but as phones get progressively bigger and taller, less so. The swipe back gesture works in most situations, but I was a fan of Allen Pike's mockup of bottom navigation on the iPhone X (or, "Pro", at the time):

[https://www.allenpike.com/2017/developing-for-iphone- pro/](https://www.allenpike.com/2017/developing-for-iphone-pro/)

Having navigation at the bottom is one of the few things Android got absolutely right at launch when compared to Apple. But back to notifications, Android isn't great either: if a new notification arrives while I'm swiping old ones away there's no consideration that I might not want to swipe away something I haven't even read yet, so it disappears immediately and with no way to get it back. Frustrating.

<comment><USER4> > but I was a fan of Allen Pike's mockup of bottom navigation on the iPhone X > (or, "Pro", at the time)

That looks too much like how Android navigation works. Apple will never go for something like this.

<comment><USER5> The Android back button is in the right position but does three things depending on the application:

\- Go back one document (like internet) \- Go back one screen \- Leave the app

A lot of Android users just hammer the back button and then the application icon again if they want to go to the Home screen of an application.

Also it's always there even if you don't have a document to go back to. Nor it provides extra information about the previous document like the title.

Personally I would like a back button down there (next to the home button) that also holds a miniature of the previous document that animates in and out of place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to me to be a special case of a more general problem which we've been seeing for decades, which is that unexpected dialogues can manifest themselves and then respond to user input intended for whatever application they were interacting with before the dialogue showed up.

I've never been able to understand why the operating system does not manage this case and ignore input that occurs within say 0.25 seconds of the dialogue's appearance, on the grounds that humans generally can't react so quickly to something they just saw, so they must not have really meant it.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking about this yesterday. Dozens of times I type a search into cortana - see my item - click on it, and milliseconds before I click (but before I can avert the action) the item changes. I have at times almost felt the electrons racing down the nerves in my arm in my attempt to not click.

I like your idea of a .25 second delay. I can normally send a movement request to my hand in about .13 seconds (fastest time I can click twice on a stopwatch is .13 seconds), so .25 is good for me.

<comment><USER8> This is maddening and makes me pine for the days before dynamic search result lists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the complaint, and this is a widespread UI flaw that extends far beyond Apple, however I think his proposed solution isn't the best.

My generalized solution that would work in any interface layout is to add new interface elements as disabled, and leave them disabled for maybe 1 full second. This would eliminate 90% of false clicks on fast moving popups.

<comment><USER10> This seems like a better solution than what the author proposed. Another thought could be that the pop-ups would only be disabled for the spatial parts of the pop-up which have an interactive element located directly below.

<comment><USER11> I was imagining somethjng like this as well, but unfamiliarity with iOS made me wonder if possible.

Personally I think the issue is slightly overstated (or I'm just not popular enough and get fewer notifications) but my use pattern usually would naturally lead me to ignore such notifications by turning them off completely. Only messages get a pop-up for me on Android (or banner in iOS) and for large group chats they only get buzzes or noises.

Maybe iOS and Android can have a priority group you can set for instant delivery and then hold non priority notifications until a period of inaction from the user, adding an small delay.

But really, the occurrence rate seems pretty low to me from my workflow. And I live on my phone at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure if it is possible, but for the iPhone Xs would it be possible before deciding to show a notification to use the TrueDepth camera to take a quick peek to see if a user's hand is near the top of the screen and delay the notification until the area is clear?

<comment><USER13> now this is an actual innovative answer

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > 2 seconds of agony, 3 times a day, that's about 0.6 hours a year.

Kind of ironic to make this sort of calculation only to post it on medium, where it can't be read until a pop-up nag is closed. I wonder how much agony I accumulate in a year of accidentally clicking medium links.

<comment><USER3> If you sign up for a Medium account you don't get any pop-ups. While I know many would object to it, if you're looking at it purely in terms of agony per year, it's an easy decision.

<comment><USER15> If you sign up, and

1\. Are currently logged in to Medium on your preferrred browser on every computer you typically use.

2\. Are not in an incognito window.

3\. Are using the correct browser (e.g. don't be signed in via chrome then hit a default browser link in ios).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can see how the author finds this an issue, but I have to disagree with his proposed solution. Halving the width of the notification in the way shown would only work in the cases where the user is pressing buttons on the left or right sides of the notification. If the notification width was to be variable based on where it could be thought that the user would be pressing, the notification's would have a very inconsistent look.

</comment><comment><USER16> Capacitive touch screens know when your finger is getting close to the screen. Apple doesn't, afaik, open up that level of detail in its APIs, but it could be used by the system to delay the display of a 3rd party overlay when the user's finger proximity indicates a tap is imminent.

This same approach could be used to pause movement on a web page during mid- render, for example if an ad or other content is late to load but the user is already clicking on a link. How many times do we end up clicking on something unintended because the page re-renders mid-tap/click?

Starting with the Samsung Galaxy S4 or S5 the phone had the ability to use finger proximity as a highlighter of sorts. I loved it, but never saw the functionality really used for more than visual candy effects.

</comment><comment><USER17> While I completely understand the problem, I do not like your solution. To me it doesn't look as good as the original and takes away a lot of space for information within the notification itself.

I'd rather build in a hidden timer, so taps on a notification only trigger an app change after a certain amount of time. E.g. 0.5 seconds after it popped up.

<comment><USER18> Another problem they didn't consider for this solution, is the people that tap the midde of the status bar to scroll to the top. With that solution, I still go into "agony"-mode.

They didn't think of that. I guess in the same way that Apple didn't think of the problem presented in that post.

Still, a solution is needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've always wondered why Apple doesn't put navigation items on the bottom of the screen much the way Android has soft keys on the bottom. It would solve this problem and also make one handed navigation easier (or possible at all).

<comment><USER20> Completely agree. Had hoped with iPhone X they would move to have interactions at the bottom, since constantly involving reachability (which is now disabled by default) to go to the top menus (since not all apps allow you to swipe from the left to go back consistently). Several apps like Instapaper work great the main navigation actions in the bottom. They have items in the top but those are ones you won't need to access often. And they leave space at the bottom to not interfere with the home button line area. Maybe we will see a push to this UI direction from Apple officially in iOS12 as I imagine iPhone screens will only get larger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This would be a good change for them to make.

I wish they'd also force apps to differentiate between functional notifications to actually use the app (eg "Your Uber has arrived!") vs advertising notifications ("Discounted Ubers today!!") I want the former but not the latter. Currently I don't have that choice though, it's all or none.

<comment><USER22> The latter is actually forbidden per the App Store guidelines:

 _4.5.3 Do not use Apple Services to spam, phish, or send unsolicited messages to customers, including Game Center, Push Notifications, etc. Do not attempt to reverse lookup, trace, relate, associate, mine, harvest, or otherwise exploit Player IDs, aliases, or other information obtained through Game Center, or you will be removed from the Developer Program._

 _4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information._

<comment><USER23> Where can you report abuses ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This isn't something bothering me. What is bothering me is more than I get the same notifications on different devices. I get Read This Email on my phone. I read the email, 2 hours later I pickup my iPad and I see the same notification while I already dealt with the email.

</comment><comment><USER25> So you're saying that on a 4 inch screen, notifications should be made even smaller. Hm.

Not everyone has the Plus model.

<comment><USER26> Smaller screens can keep it full width. The iPad (in some previous iteration, don't know what it looks like now) already has notifications that don't span the whole width. Seems reasonable other large screen non-iPad devices might do the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a rather general problem, and here's my general solution:

Currently(0), we use the same virtual grid for visual layout as for mouse/touch interactions. If there's a box displayed visually, then there's a corresponding box that's available to receive clicks. If that box moves 100px down the screen, then the click-receiving box also moves 100px down the screen _immediately_. If you clicked the original box's location _just as it moves_ , the computer replies with something like, "hey idiot, why did you just click empty space?" Why can't the computer be a little less of a bully and recognize the _intent_ of the user by looking into the past a little to see what the user _tried_ to click?

Instead of keeping these grids in lock step with one another, the click/touch- receiving grid should be delayed by 10-200+ milliseconds (and tunable -- esports players on one end and elderly/disabled folks on the other). This grid from the past is _actually_ what you intended to click.

Back to the example above, if you click the box just as it moves, the click is now checked against this slightly-old grid instead of the current (suddenly changed) visual location of the box, and the computer correctly detects that the click was aimed at the box.

0: in any system I've worked on; I imagine some system has tried to make this better, though?

</comment><comment><USER28> This article feels more like an ad for where the author works.

<comment><USER29> A not great ad - the squished notification format looks terrible

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I disabled most notifications but is still occasionally hit by this; more annoying imho is trying to use siri-app "suggestions", the exact moment you press it often reorganize the icons making you enter something completely unrelated!

</comment><comment> Y-bar > If only 0.002% of the 700M+ iPhone users have a similar experience on a > daily basis, collectively these notifications are causing over 8400 hours a > year of pain to users.

This echoes the Saving Lives[1] anecdote:

> "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply > that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. > Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten > seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't > you think?"

        [1] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

<comment><USER31> The problem with such calculations is the assumption (often incorrect) that those little bits of "wasted" time would have been used for something more productive and are anything more than statistical noise.

While my home machine came out of hibernation yesterday evening I stroked the cat. I would have probably done that anyway while the authentication screen waited for me, had it started up faster.

While my work machine started up this morning I discussed the outcome of one of yesterday's problems with a colleague. This took several minutes so the PC starting in 20 seconds instead of 30 would have made no difference at all.

<comment><USER32> That's my reaction to that argument as well, whenever I hear it. "Over X amount of time you're saving X minutes/hours/whatever". It's nonsense, especially when we get into the seconds or microseconds, amounts of time hardly worth saving.

There are far more important reasons to not interrupt someone's workflow than "closing the notification takes precious seconds from my life". It's not the 2 seconds it takes to switch back to the other app, it's the 1 minute 45 seconds it takes to get my mind back to my original task or the 23 minutes that I'm distracted by whatever the attention-thief was.

Or worse yet, it's the lifetime and several hundred dollars when I become so frustrated that I switch to another phone. It's the $3 and hours of use that I've wasted when I switch to an app that doesn't demand push notifications.

Complaining about seconds wasted is ridiculous. If a second is "wasted", you're losing a lot more than just that one second. Don't make your argument based on the least impactful point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That is, if you care about notifications.

Let's not forget that on iOS you can disable every notification, which is the much better option.

</comment><comment><USER34> Rather than a resize or a timer, I'd prefer to see the tappable area changed to exclude the most commonly used hot spots on the screen, such as the top left and right corner.

It could also detect when there is a tappable element under the tap-sensitive middle of the notification, and introduce a short delay only in those cases.

If there was to be a delay, 0.5 seconds sounds way too long. More like 0.2 - 0.3 would be good, and in the meantime (during the delay) the banner could pass the taps through to whatever element was visible before the notification came along.

</comment><comment><USER35> The proposed solution sucks, but it is a valid problem that needs fixing.

<comment><USER36> Maybe just lower the notification by a half inch, so that the top of it is below where the top nav links are? Could still, then, be full-width.

<comment><USER37> A better solution would be to use the status bar at the top, similar to how it changes when "In call".

Have it change colour, and say "1 new Mail notification" etc, and if you tap that, you get the proper context notification show up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reduced width of top notification would work well on the X and Plus, but would be less usable on the smaller phones, with it being specifically unusable on the SE.

With the exception of the iPhone X, all iPhone devices have almost identical UX. In this way I do not think the author considered all of Apple's customers. Furthermore the SE, 6s and 7 are entry level phones, and Apple has an invested interest in attracting more entry level phone buyers, and in making current entry level phone users have as smooth as possible upgrade experience.

When holding my phone one handed, and a notification appears I want to open, I often tap the very side of a notification. Reprogramming my motion to reach farther would require effort. This is a cost. The author makes no mention of the costs of the UX change. Apple collects data on where a person taps on a push notification and if it appears to be a mistake. Apple is in a place to make data based design decisions. Fairpixel is not in a place to make data based design decisions on Apple's operating systems.

The purpose of the article is not to inspire change in Apple's iOS, but to push Fairpixel's brand as experts in UX/Design. I think it shows impulsiveness. Suggesting changes on hundreds of millions of devices based on evidence of one person's experience is irresponsible. Pretending like a change in UX is 100% positive and will not have costs is dishonest. Marketing your boutique firm as smarter then Apple at UX is arrogant. This article would dissuade me from working with Fairpixel in the future if I were considering it.

Edit: All edits are grammatical in nature.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can definitely relate. My only "solution" is to disable notifications for any non-essential applications. Facebook for example.

<comment><USER40> I do this too but not for this reason. I just find most notifications are annoying/spam.

<comment><USER39> Agree

</comment></comment></comment><comment> matt-attack Wow, do people actually permit a new mail message to justify a Notification? No wonder this guy has this problem. Notifications should be restricted to communication channels explicitly intended for instant feedback (e.g. iMessage). I turn off most other apps' ability to interrupt me. I just can't conceive of a reason I need to be interrupted by most apps.

<comment><USER3> Everyone's use case and life is different. Some people might need to instantly react to an e-mail - there's no actual iron-clad reason why an iMessage is more important than an e-mail, after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Namely disable them. The website registration is about as annoying as pop-ups now. It's one of those things, that once you open pandora's box on ... you can't really put it back in the box.

I find notifications great for a phone, but terrible on implementation on desktop. But maybe my workflow is more unique than most? Or maybe its just not evolved. It drives me bananas, in general because its so abused.

The other portion of this is Cloud buy in. If you purchase a Cloud product from Apple, the specific portion of Photos (the app) that unifies the experience across platforms - iPhone, iPad, Mac desktop/laptops - does not have one feature to back out photos and archive. You have to individually select and the previous feature to "select all" or cntrl-click from start to last on an image group has disappeared. They effectively make it impossible to export a catalog.

 _argh!!!! JACKIE CHAN MEME!!!!_

</comment><comment><USER42> Sorry for the long comment. TL;DR: this is a symptom of a larger problem around how we use notifications.

I really don't like how notifications are used in general. They are a ui tool that we would ideally use to interrupt ourselves when it's truly necessary, but that's almost never the case[1].

When your screen is on, it's usually because you're doing something with your phone. If a notification comes in during this time, it shouldn't be able to disrupt your workflow unless you opt into that disruption. I love the idea of using the status bar to give a heads up that there's a new notification in the app. It's already used to provide a "back" button when you've opted to open an app from a notification (which, granted, was a controversial UI decision), so there is some precedent for it.

Generally though, most apps send you notifications when you don't need them. I'd argue that users wouldn't hate being taken away from what they were doing _as_ much if it took them to something both time-sensitive and actionable. Notifications should be originate from a user's interactions (whether the active user, like when setting reminders, or other users, like when sending messages), and even then they should be used carefully. In the article, the screenshot shows the user getting a notification about a promotional email. There's almost never a scenario in which a user couldn't have waited until later to read that promotion. I love that the Gmail app gives you the option to only get notified for new emails in your inbox; that's a great first step. Things like group chats are still pretty broken (you want to know when there's unread messages in a chat, not every time someone in the group sends a message).

[1]: [http://trydesignlab.com/blog/are-notifications-a-dark- patter...](http://trydesignlab.com/blog/are-notifications-a-dark-pattern-ux- ui/)

</comment><comment><USER43> But one can argue about clicking the top while doing things like scrolling upward and ready to click on an article on the page. There is a better fix then shuffling the notification elsewhere. I argue a temporary freeze is better - if there is no response from the user after one second, the user is free to swipe up to hide the notification. This will prevent accidental click. Yes, there is a possibility of in-between temporal display-and-click, but will probably yield a better result. This needs research. One has to identify common hotspot. This can be, however, at the expense of user experience. But we can find a common ground or offer it as an option.

Another possibility is snoozing notification by learning how often a user will read notification immediately, so that notifications will not display for sometime.

</comment><comment><USER44> What I'd like to see is a sort of queue for notifications while in quiet mode.

Just put them all in a queue similar to a twitter feed, that can be reviewed later. This would be the best way imho to handle the need for focus.

Then people can decide to review these once a day, or multiple times a day, but when it actually makes sense for them.

This would also require the ability to specify an exclusion for some apps (ie. "notifiy always" vs "queue notification").

ps: the notification area is a sort of queue, but I don't want to see it on the homescreen as it still is begging for attention. Put it away in a separate app or area that can be reviewed _intentionally_.

</comment><comment><USER5> First of all those buttons shouldn't be up there to begin with. They're too far away from the fingers of most users to tap comfortably one-handed after Apple moved up to 4" screens and larger. Android has it in the right position though that back button has other problems I won't go into here right now. The "action" button(s) on the top right suffer from the same problem.

I would always put information on the top and buttons in the bottom half. Unless it's stuff that's totally out of the normal flow of usage like a help button or a feedback form.

That's the real fix of that problem.

</comment><comment><USER45> Android simply lets you swipe the notification left to make it vanish - <USER2> you not do something similar with Apple?

I guess its still an issue if you just want to ignore the notification for a moment and not get rid of it yet however.

<comment><USER46> Yes, you swipe it up. This is a nonissue.

<comment><USER47> It is an issue, because as your finger is making its way to tap "Back" or "Done" the notification pops under it. It's like when an ad loads directly under your mouse cursor, overlaying something you want to click on, as the neural signal to your click-muscle is already halfway down your arm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Great observation! This happens with Android as well. I really like the solution, but would go even further. Give users an option to configure where the notifications are displayed and per app control.

<comment><USER49> Android has more notification control, but I think the main reason that this doesn't feel like as much of an issue on Android is that the back button is on the bottom of the screen and the Up button isn't used nearly as frequently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I just block all notifications. Phones are much more pleasant that way.

<comment><USER51> Same. I allow lock-screen notifications from important things (mail, messages) and disable every other notification. Getting constant notifications would be my nightmare

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Swipe left Siri suggested icons used to render, then move around depending on your location, the last time you used the app. Similar UI, totally maddening, and that changed in a recent release.

I'd prefer a setting where you would be notified after you returned to the home screen. I'd like to finish the thing I'm doing before getting a notification. Maybe you can accomplish the same thing by turning notifications off, and just swiping down every once in a while?

</comment><comment><USER53> Cool observation - not as bad on Android due to a hardware back button, but it still happens.

Or another option to solve it??? Just don't show notifications when the user is "obviously" using their phone. e.g. if there's been any tap in the last 5s, make the noise but don't show the pop-up until the screen has gone untouched for 5s (the user can still swipe down from the top to see it).

<comment><USER34> Good idea. Also, obviously using the phone could include when the front-facing camera or sensor array (iPhone X) can clearly see that there is a finger hovering close to the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I don't mean sound curmudgeonly here but I haven't turned on notifications in nearly five damn years. They're universally annoying.

I miss shit all the time but idc

</comment><comment><USER55> Allow taps to pass through the regions of the notification pane which have a control underneath for 0.5 seconds after the notification pops up.

</comment><comment><USER56> Here's an alternate solution: Have the sound for the notification play before the popup actually appears on the screen, say 0.25 seconds.

<comment><USER57> My phone is permanently on mute. How would that help me?

<comment><USER56> It does vibrate on notifications still, right?

I'd be willing to guess users who have vibrate turned off as well are a very small percentage.

<comment><USER34> I have all sounds and vibrations turned off. Works great in conjunction with an Apple watch that has vibrations turned on. Not arguing with your percentage guess; I'd guess the same thing... just saying there are some of us :-).

Edit: BTW the described idea probably wouldn't work with my Apple watch setup, because it seems there can be some latency between the iPhone and the watch with respect to notifications. I wouldn't want to get a vibration on the watch then be wondering for a few seconds "when is something going to pop up on my phone?" I realize technically the notification comes to the phone first under the hood... but where it is displayed first is a matter of programming.

<comment><USER56> Very interesting. Slightly unrelated, but since this seems to be the primary motive behind an Apple Watch(notification improvements), I'm curious how your workflow works out for you?

Having seen how often the bluetooth/wifi calling and messaging fails b/w my iPhone and Mac, I decided against trying an Apple Watch. Is it any better?

<comment><USER34> There's not much workflow to it. Unfortunately I don't use the watch for much other than two very useful functions: 1) getting bumped when there's an incoming notification, or getting a hard to ignore vibration when I have an incoming call; 2) using the "find my phone" feature, which is super convenient compared to logging on to icloud.com, and makes your phone play a ping sound even if it's otherwise silent.

Sometimes I have to turn on sound on the phone for things like Waze or for playing videos or music. But the ringer stays off (due to settings).

The connection with the iPhone and Mac seems fine. However, with my watch (1st generation) a couple of updates ago the lost phone ping feature got a new unwelcome degree of latency. It can now take up to 30 seconds for the phone to ping, where it used to be immediate. I don't know if this is the case for newer models. Nor could I say whether the problem is on the watch side, or the phone side (doesn't matter, I guess). But at least it still works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> That's one solution, but random notifications are still a problem. There are some apps where I want certain notifications, like "you have a new message," but other notifications are basically "hey! you haven't opened the app in a while!" I need that granularity of control (or a report spam button).

</comment><comment><USER59> I definitely hit this. Perhaps a size update would help, but I also feel that there should be a slight invulnerability period so to say where taps on it do nothing for half a second. Not noticeable for most intended use cases, but provides a less agonizing context switching experience.

</comment><comment><USER60> Apple should make notification useful before they worry about this minor annoyance IMO. I hate that doing something like reading the new email doesn't dismiss the notification. I disable notifications for most apps because they just give me one more thing to clean up.

</comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if it's possible to keep track of what existed at the pixel (or whatever the technically correct term to use here is) at the time the user clicked there, and if a new notification overwrites that pixel, only apply the user action to the previous notification.

</comment><comment><USER62> Conversely, you've now put notifications in the most difficult to reach position on the screen.

<comment><USER63> That might be fine. They'll continue to live in the notification tray, waiting for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Not the notification issue I was expecting. On MacOS non administrative users get notified of upgrades that they don't have the appropriate permission to act on, and can only defer the notification with "try again tonight", or "remind me later".

Extremely frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is why I like Ubuntu Unity's notifications:

\- you can't click on them

\- if you hover them with the mouse, they go transparent

\- if you do try to click, the click will pass-through to the GUI element underneath.

They never ever get in the way. And you can find them again if you miss one. I like 'em.

<comment><USER66> and I thought this behavior (which drove me crazy) was a bug: you try to click them and they fade away. what were they thinking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Don't know what the solution is, but this happens to me _all_ the time too.

</comment><comment><USER68> I just want my sms messages to be correctly ordered by sent/received time again.

<comment><USER69> I think this is fixed in the most recent iOS version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> It seems like not accepting any user interaction within the first 500ms for popup dialogues / notifications like this would be a better solution than crushing the notification into the middle of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER57> Another annoying failure mode is when you notice a notification and go to dismiss it ... just as it disappears and now you're accidentally phoning someone at 3am via WhatsApp/Viber/Messenger.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is definitely an annoying problem, but I don't like the solution. Rather, they should just ignore the tap for a 250ms or so to allow people to process what they want to do.

</comment><comment><USER72> I have this problem more often on the Mac than on iOS. In particular, Mail notifications only have "Reply" and "Delete" actions.

Anyone know how to quickly dismiss these without taking an action?

<comment><USER73> You can swipe (with the trackpad or magic mouse, only works when the cursor is hovering over the notification) or drag the notification to the right to make it go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> solution is easy to imagine and has been implemented before (I've seen it in a video game that I can't recall specifically). If an unanticipatable navigation element is activated less than ~.1 sec after appearing, ignore the command. human reaction latency means that that could not have been intended.

I don't recall if the click was sent to the now-obscured target or if it was just cancelled. either way, Apple could apply this to all notifications very easily.

</comment><comment><USER75> As someone with a visual impairment who has large text size turned on, I laugh at the short-sightedness of this solution and associated Medium thinkpiece.

</comment><comment><USER76> And the alarm , which fails to wake me up, or oddly wakes me up ~30 minutes later. And the random "reminders" that i get from 487 days ago.

</comment><comment> shaki-dora > By the time I've navigated back to the Notes app and performed the > originally intended action, I've experienced pure agony for about 2 seconds.

Is this a parody? Don't people have real problems? This level of petty self–indulgence is almost worrying.

I'm not disputing that this may be a minor annoyance. But to invoke "agony" is an insult to anyone who has ever experienced real suffering or existential dread.

And to slap on the old "Dear Apple" cliché just to get your 15 minutes of (limited) attention is somewhat sad.

</comment><comment><USER77> This is really really irritating on OS X when you want to hit something on the toolbar or a tab.

</comment><comment><USER78> Did iOS get rid of the "turn off banner notifications," or whatever it's called, in settings?

</comment><comment><USER79> Couldn't you still accidentally tap it?

</comment><comment><USER80> Maybe the option to double tap on the notification to open them? Thats simple and doesnt break layout

</comment><comment><USER81> Feature idea: allow the user to change the app permissions directly in the push notification.

</comment><comment><USER82> Just add a back button to iPhones - it's proven workable solution

<comment><USER83> There already is one when app-switching. So in the example described, the writer would have ended up in Mail, and could then hit the upper-left corners to get back to Notes immediately. Not even two seconds. Not even one second.

<comment><USER82> My daily driver is an iPhone, the touch area in the top left is nowhere near as good as the 'physical' Android button

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Related beef: Apple wants me to update something on MacOS, and the pops a notification with the options "Install Now" and "Details" \- meaning "Yes" or "Tell me more!"

What about "No" and "Not right now"?

<comment><USER34> I think they tried that, and found fewer people were updating.

No solution is perfect for everybody. There are tradeoffs. If you read between the lines you can see that in this tradeoff, they are optimizing for getting more people to stay up to date. Which has many benefits which arguably outweigh the annoyance you experience.

<comment><USER84> Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Now this is a "First world problem"...

</comment><comment><USER86> deal with the root cause, disable notifications.

</comment><comment><USER87> This is solved nicely on Android with its back button …

</comment><comment><USER88> Dear Apple, please disable notifications. Nobody needs them.

</comment><comment><USER89> Apple customer care: "We absolutely can help you! Please deactivate notifications for the apps which bother you. Nothing as easy as that!"

<comment><USER90> Except what if it's an application I care about, but just not this 0.25 seconds?

Also, why the implied snark?

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I honestly find myself taking a shit load of screenshots on the iPhone X. Now that's annoying af!</comment>


Technology enables better User Experiences - <AUTHOR> http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/12/03/technology-experiences/

<comment><USER2> I've had a similar experience with a Samsung laptop and the consumer electronics store I bought it through. The touchpad had stopped working, so I took it to the shop's tech desk. After confirming the touchpad didn't work in my OS, the consultant used a usb live disc to verify it was definitely the hardware. Then they shipped it to Samsung, rang me when it came back, and I received a detailed list of the tests and replacements that occurred.</comment>


Spain Arrests 3 in Sony PSN Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/technology/11hack.html

<comment><USER2> The most interesting part of the story is how they are celebrating and proud about having caught 'the leaders of Anonymous'. Can't they understand that it is decentralized and the arrested people could be leaders of a small organization inside the group, but not of the group itself?</comment>


Java Array Type Hints in Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://asymmetrical-view.com/2009/07/02/clojure-primitive-arrays.html

<comment><USER2> I kind of get the feeling that Clojure is running into the 90% milestone now (only 90% more to go!). The core the language is pretty good, but now people are starting to find the warts, and they appear largely Java related.

It will be interesting to see if projects like Clojure-in-Clojure will help resolve some of the niggling issues like dealing with classpaths and odd performance issues where people aren't sure if they should be passing type hints or not.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to PhantomJS that works with OpenVZ (64 bit Linux)? - <AUTHOR>

There is a segfault at run (dealing with webkit): https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/pull/295
Which happens to be issues for some people: https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/10481
And I was wondering what others may have used to get around this problem (and/or possible locations for binaries of such)? <comment><USER2> Rather than an alternative to PhantomJS, I would look for an alternative hosting provider.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would except this isn't my machine… I'm just going to edit some files in webkit and wait the 30 min I guess :S

Thanks.</comment></comment>


CascadiaJS - a JSConf for the Pacific Northwest - <AUTHOR> http://cascadiajs.com

<comment><USER2> For $275? No way.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a not-for-profit event and every penny will be spent on flying in the best speakers and providing a really amazing experience for the attendees, many of which are coming in from out of town. In fact, we'd have to charge much more if not for the financial support of our sponsors.

<comment><USER3> Why is icanhazcheezburger sponsoring this?

<comment><USER4> Ben Huh, their CEO, started the network in in Seattle and still lives here, as does the company (to the best of my knowledge)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is the exactly the right place and the right time for such an event. Great to see it in my backyard!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you're excited! I moved to Seattle almost exactly 3 years ago to work at Microsoft and was always mystified why I had to go somewhere else (DC, Portland, Scottsdale, the list goes on) to attend an awesome JS conference. That sense of "why not us?" was the genesis for this event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea. Any idea on what the topics will be?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. Topics will run the gamut of applications of JS (browser, Node.js, Windows 8, etc). We used GitHub to post a public call-for-speakers. Prospective speakers were asked to fork the repo, add their proposal and submit a pull request. All credit to Troy Howard (@thoward37) for setting that up. You can check-out the submissions here:

[https://github.com/cascadiajs/cascadiajs.github.com/tree/mas...](https://github.com/cascadiajs/cascadiajs.github.com/tree/master/proposal)</comment></comment>


Physicist proposes a new type of computing at SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/03/10/physicist-proposes-a-new-type-of-computing-at-sxsw-check-out-orbital-computing/

<comment><USER2> It looks like the speaker, Josh Turner, gave a similar talk here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7y6a1okd4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy7y6a1okd4)

<comment><USER3> the quality of that video is much better than the official site's: [https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/community/past- lectures/quant...](https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/community/past- lectures/quantum-lightswitch-new-direction-ultrafast-electronics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I clicked the link, I was certain it was going to be Stephen Wolfram. Glad to see I was wrong :) Nothing against the man. He's a genius - it's just that he's EVERYWHERE.

In all seriousness, this looks really cool. It is yet to be seen which technology will be most cost effective and performant, but between optical computing, 3D transistors, and technologies such as this, the exponential rise in the price/performance of computing power looks like it is not going to stall out any time in the next 10-15 years.

<comment><USER5> >the exponential rise in the price/performance of computing power looks like it is not going to stall out any time in the next 10-15 years.

research is good, yet it isn't enough for progress. You need driving force like market competition. With AMD out of the game (hopefully temporarily) Intel, with Ivy Bridge, went of to sell smaller chips (instead of doubling the number of cores on the same area chip) for the same money and with Haswell they decided that they can sell it much longer before introducing new generation (Broadwell). We need AMD back, or much faster ARMs, or whatever to start breathing into Intel's neck again ...

<comment><USER6> The next revolution is widespread GPGPU programming, which can yield great increase in performance when leverage correctly. Java 8 already have libraries for HSA and Java 9 will support it out of the box. And this is AMD lead technology.

<comment><USER7> While i'm vaguely excited for HSA i'm pretty skeptical of anything that needs to be 'leveraged correctly' there's a history of sufficiently smart compilers not materializing.

<comment><USER8> Depends. Multithreading is a common method nowadays despite sufficiently smart compilers not existing. It just requires someone who knows what they are doing, just like good multithreaded code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this just a flavour of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintronics) ?

<comment><USER10> No. Spintronics still uses electron transport, but the electrons are spin polarized. Atoms aren't individually excited in spintronics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any link to the original scientific article this came from?</comment>


Fluid (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://fabiensanglard.net/fluide/index.php <comment><USER2> Wow the algorithm is simpler then I expected. I think I'm gonna try and build this with processing some day

</comment><comment><USER3> "Fluid is an interactive water simulation for the iPhone"</comment>


One YouTube account's 77,000 mysterious videos - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/may/01/truth-youtube-mysterious-videos-webdriver-torso <comment><USER2> Spoiler from the article:

"Isaul Vargas, a New York-based software tester, spotted the videos in a post on BoingBoing and recognised them from an automation conference he had been at a year ago. They were being shown by a European firm that made streaming software for set-top boxes, the kit that sits under a TV and connects to services such as Sky or Netflix.

The company needed to be able to quickly and reliably upload digital video, a capability which it tested by uploading short, randomly generated snippets to its YouTube channel and running image-recognition software on it. "Considering the volume of videos and the fact they use YouTube, it tells me that this is a large company testing their video encoding software and measuring how Youtube compresses the videos," says Vargas."

<comment><USER3> The signal to noise ratio of this article is amazing.

<comment><USER4> You read it on The Guardian; a news service, not a Q&A website.

<comment><USER5> Moreover, the Guardian is a news service with a relatively high standard of quality. They're not your typical CNN.

<comment><USER6> > They're not your typical CNN

Seriously they are, just with a different agenda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised nobody noticed that the names of the videos are from mktemp(3).

        >>> tempfile.mktemp()
        '/tmp/tmplOcKyZ'
        >>> tempfile.mktemp()
        '/tmp/tmpW0dJUR'

        tmpwxm2CP
        3 weeks ago - 31,842 views

        tmpElnFwp
        3 weeks ago - 112 views

Betting aqua.flv is the source file, the name of the video is the temporary output file (probably from a transcoder), and the article's conclusion about testing is accurate.

<comment><USER8> aqua.flv would probably match the Aqua Teen Hunger Force clip behind the paywall?

To do some math (that may be helpful or not): 77000 YouTube videos * 10 frames per YouTube video / 24 frames per second / 3600 seconds per hour = 8.91 hours of video

<comment><USER9> Why did you convert from time to frames to frames to time when you could just have kept it in time? Also, your maths is off:

      77,000 videos * 10 seconds = 770,000 seconds
      770,000 seconds / 60 / 60 = 213.89 hours

<comment><USER10> Because people perceive video not to be 1 frame/second.

<comment><USER11> If so, those videos had perhaps 240 frames each, not 10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord See also: A man who has uploaded 6,300 videos and counting of him doing nothing but smoking pipes and grumbling unintelligible streams of broken English that are conveniently transcribed in the descriptions: [https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/](https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/)

YouTube is full of bizarre channels.

<comment><USER12> See also Gluse which is a man riding elevators in various buildings.

[http://youtube.com/user/gluse](http://youtube.com/user/gluse)

(I am not mocking him. I admire the ability to create so many videos about a focussed topic.)

<comment><USER13> I bet his viewers would be willing to pitch together some money and get him some sort of steadycam rig; the random video I clicked on was very hard to watch.

<comment><USER14> YouTube actually offer to fix videos that the algos find to be shaky; I wonder if they are choosing not to run the fix or if it's failing (the vid I viewed has some really fast transient wobble that doesn't seem like normal camera shake).

<comment><USER15> The youtube video stabilization makes for wobbly video. I take video inside of race cars, and they're unwatchable if you use the youtube stabilization. They turn out much more watchable without it.

<comment><USER16> The spatial warping that happens is also very disorienting sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> BBC has a different take on this [1] and denies Isaul Vargas's explanation. The part with hidden Aqua Teen Hunger Force clip and the fact that it's named aqua.flv is curious.

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27238332)

<comment><USER18> Also the palette is one of Russian tricolor! There must be a beautiful conspiracy theory in it..

<comment><USER12> It's also the French tricolor and one of the videos takes a small payment from French credit cards to display a french thing (eifal tower?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is by far the strangest way I've ever been quoted in a published story. I still vote aliens.

</comment><comment><USER20> This was a machine learning experiment and has since been shut down, due to the agent's unexpected capabilities. We hope to re-enable it once we've managed to control the psychosis inducing effects.

Also, please don't watch more than 8 of these in a row.

<comment><USER21> shame about that near-eastern medical attache in Boston...

<comment><USER22> And now I feel compelled to reread _Infinite Jest_... a compulsion which is satisfying, in a self-referential kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 500+ hours of similar video content, most clearly computer-generated, with junk titles (from mkfile), and a new video being uploaded every 20 seconds. No "normal" videos other than the one behind a paywall and the one of the Eiffel Tower.

I don't know what the YouTube TOS says about automated bulk uploads, but I think such a user would have raised many flags on the system, regarding abuse, and the account would have been deactivated by now, right?... I'm betting that whoever is behind this has a special permit from Google.

edit: grammar

<comment><USER24> There is one organization that does not need special dispensation to violate the youtube terms of service.

<comment><USER25> So your guess is that google is testing automated uploads to their own service with public videos?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's a guy: [http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/~matei](http://www.math.univ- paris13.fr/~matei)

->> Laboratoire Analyse, Géométrie et Applications Sounds `real`.

Source: [https://twitter.com/model500/status/461978031578701824](https://twitter.com/model500/status/461978031578701824)

Edit: also this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682360) seems to confirm it.

</comment><comment><USER27> This ran as a piece on BBC Radio 4's today programme (quintessentially English), er, today.

"Do you think it's a machine producing these? Or is somebody sitting there all day producing these?", and other such questions for the non-technical. As mentioned in the article they compared it to the phenomena of the 'Numbers Station' and suggested it might be governments communicating with their overseas spies. Priceless.

One interesting point they raised is that out of the 77,000 uploads there are two non-rectangle videos, both of scenes in Paris, France - so I bet the 'European' company is French.

<comment><USER26> Interesting one guy pointed me a similar thing: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682769)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is by far the strangest approach to quality control I've ever seen.

<comment><USER29> Yeah... they're testing compression for 7 months 24/7 or what? It seems odd. Like they forgot to turn it off.

<comment><USER30> It could be performance monitoring. A company could be doing it to monitor how long it takes YT to process new videos.

<comment><USER29> That actually makes sense!

<comment><USER31> That doesn't make sense actually. Who would need to test for youtube performance 24/7 at 20s intervals?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A couple of years ago I was researching the distribution of filenames people uploaded onto flickr. One user there had multiple accounts and was uploading thousands of versions of an identical image with the same filename.

[http://datagenetics.com/blog/december22012/index.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog/december22012/index.html)

<comment><USER33> I wonder if they're identical from a binary point of view, or if this was being used as some form of steganography...

<comment><USER34> After testing around 10 at random, they seem to have the same md5 hash.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/11391873@N05/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/11391873@N05/)

<comment><USER35> Russian programmers testing blackhat marketing automation tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> People see things and recognise things that aren't really there in clouds, as in internet clouds.

If you are building some type of API or interface then this stuff happens. The behaviour - when a machine does it - is inexplicable to the Radio 4 listening types that get other people to 'write their API's'.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was hoping this might be an internet version of the old shortwave "numbers" stations [1] but now I see that there is likely a more mundane explanation.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station)

<comment><USER38> In an age of asymmetric public-key cryptography there would be very little to gain from number stations and a lot to lose.

<comment><USER39> How does an operator reliably, repeatedly and securely use "asymmetric public- key cryptography" in an environment where the possession of a laptop is cause for suspicion?

<comment><USER40> The places that ban laptops _love_ one-time pads...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> That's exactly what they WOULD say. I still think it's aliens.

<comment><USER42> Aliens looking to hire engineer #1 (YC S14)

<comment><USER20> Non-technical alien looking for technical alien co-founder (Centaurans preferred)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this in accordance with YouTube's TOS?

<comment><USER44> It's art! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> We automation engineers are really good with the bailing wire and duct tape.

<comment><USER46> Minor note, it is baling (from a bale)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> There was another post about this today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679920).

</comment><comment><USER33> The audio reminds me of some of the slower digital modes used in HF ham radio... Would be interesting to see if there is any pattern to the frequencies.

</comment><comment><USER48> This sounds _very_ similar to the work of Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, the team behind Horse_ebooks and Pronunciation Book. More here (paid content alert) [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/horse...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/horse- ebooks-and-pronunciation-book-revealed.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> Reminds me of Gibsons "Pattern Recognition".

<comment><USER50> "Webdriver Torso" even sounds like a character from a Gibson novel.

Also note that the word "torso" appears multiple times throughout his work. Search for yourself, [http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/](http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/).

Ok I've gone too deep into this

<comment><USER51> even weirder, Gibson himself has a torso

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Reminds me of @googuns_staging: [https://twitter.com/googuns_staging](https://twitter.com/googuns_staging)

Here's an article about it from last year: [http://www.theawl.com/2013/03/spy- twitter-is-weird-twitte](http://www.theawl.com/2013/03/spy-twitter-is-weird- twitte)

</comment><comment><USER53> Why not set the videos as private.

<comment><USER54> In the hope that this very situation arises, I'd say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There is one channel similar to this, but this time its purpose seems to only be "marketing"..

[https://www.youtube.com/user/epoGuSBef/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/epoGuSBef/videos)

</comment><comment><USER56> First thing that came to my head was it's some kind of Raven's Progressive Matrices test

Then at the end YouTube gives you 4 related videos so you have to next watch the one related to what you just saw...

Just first thing I thought it might be...idk

</comment><comment><USER50> Unsatisfied by the conclusion

</comment><comment><USER57> This shows how easy it is to keep people busy.

Just make something random, mysterious, use strange name and make it look like a cryptography thing...and enjoy watching the internet goes into a storm.

</comment><comment><USER58> > as the caption "aqua.flv" in the bottom-left corner

This is clearly Flash, and would never happen if they were using HTML5!

</comment><comment><USER59> It's Bitcoin 2.0 blockchain

</comment><comment><USER60> maybe he is using youtube as a hardrive backup.

</comment><comment><USER61> VALVE = 22112225

77,000 / 22112225 = 0,003

HL3 Confirmed!

<comment><USER14> Timecube?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> webdriver = selenium automation. nothing strange

<comment><USER63> Browser compatibility testing FTW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Food for thought.

</comment><comment><USER65> Yes i bet if aliens were invading they would do it via youtube... Who reads newspapers and stuff nowadays anyways?</comment>


Getting started with maps in Python - <AUTHOR> http://maxberggren.github.io/2015/08/04/basemap/

<comment><USER2> Nice walkthrough! However, I'm surprised they're using basemap for this. Basemap is still maintained, but it's more or less been superseded by Cartopy. (Also, Cartopy should support the Winkle Tripel projection, as Proj4 supports it.)

 _Edit:_ Scratch the Winkel Tripel projection support. Proj4 doesn't define an inverse method for that projection (it's non-trivial), so it can't be used correctly by cartopy.

<comment><USER3> I'm the author of [http://sensitivecities.com/so-youd-like-to-make-a-map- using-...](http://sensitivecities.com/so-youd-like-to-make-a-map-using-python- EN.html) and make maps using Python all the time.

I'd love to switch to Cartopy, but its documentation isn't comprehensive or well-presented. I check back every six months or so, and then forget about it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> This one really helped me back when I needed choropleth maps. So thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use [https://github.com/andrea- cuttone/geoplotlib](https://github.com/andrea-cuttone/geoplotlib) in my work and highly recommend checking it out.

The lib uses openstreetmaps as background, can display scatters, heatmaps, shapefiles, calculate and display voronoi tesselation, and does a ton of other things.

</comment><comment><USER5> nice - here is a cartopy version .. [https://gist.github.com/darkblue-b/6d9aab096ffe9bce3a52](https://gist.github.com/darkblue-b/6d9aab096ffe9bce3a52)

(that dataset and more examples are freely available from OSGeo) [http://live.osgeo.org](http://live.osgeo.org)

</comment><comment><USER6> Does the author even know Python? Because in Python maps are called dicts!

<comment><USER7> FYI the submitted article is about cartographic maps.

<comment><USER8> I think (hope) it was a joke.

<comment><USER6> at least _someone_ gets me!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback for personal portfolio site? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN.
Been working on a new portfolio[0]. I'm trying to break into freelance web development. I've changed a lot of things recently, using techniques learned in Daniel Pink's "To sell is human"
I'd love to hear about anything & everything you have to say, good or bad. I want to make sure that my portfolio turns a "maybe" into a sale.
All source is on github[1], so feel free to critique the source code as well if that's more your thing.
Hoping you guys can give me a few general tips on where to go next in pursuing freelancing.
[0] http://dominic.io/ [1] https://github.com/SevereOverfl0w/Portfolio <comment><USER2> first, i think it looks good. the following are a bit nitpicky.

you should focus more on your work, and tell the story behind what occurred on each project.

put yourselves in the shoes of a potential client: they probably want to know how the process works, etc.

remember, you want people to buy your services, so show what those services are front and center. big pictures. don't hide the detail behind the click (in the modal). put it out there. make it the star of the show.

i'd alter the tone to say "what can i do for you?" rather than "what can you do for me?" i think the former is a more common style.

i'd drop the bit about the deposit. it's not really useful - 40% of what exactly? if it won't make or break the customer choosing your services, don't bring it up so early. if anything it might be better to express the price class of your service (in general ranges), but leave everything else up for debate once the person contacts you.

the top nav menu doesn't do much on a site this small; perhaps that space could be used for dramatic effect rather than this utilitarian role.

i think that's about it. good luck in your venture!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it's been a lot of work getting here.

Yeah, expand on the information a little bit. I was trying to strike a balance between too much & too little information.

Do you have any suggestions on how to expand the portfolio like that (no modals), without cluttering the page?

Okay, easy peasy!

That was my attempt at trying to describe the process. I failed terribly! I'm going to have a little think about a better way to describe the process (and more of it) in a concise & clear way.

Any dramatic effect suggestions?

Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Create a plugin, extension, or theme.

For WHAT? I assume you mean wordpress, but it would be best to say that.

> Create safe website update procedures

What does that mean? Reads like you ran out of stuff to bullet so you tacked on something which sounded good.

I'd also included database technologies in your "What can you work with?" section.

When I click on "Featured Work," I get a modal dialog and by far the most important thing on that is the "View Live" button, but it is extremely hard to find since it blends in with the other text on the page.

Also that dialog looks unbalanced. You have two things on the left and one thing on the right. It either looks like "Technologies used" is incorrectly positioned OR the title/link are incorrectly positioned. Regardless for such an important dialog it feels really poorly thought out.

Overall I hate the modal dialog. Here's some examples of what others have done:

[http://cleayweb.com.au/](http://cleayweb.com.au/) [http://www.sarahevansdesign.co.uk/](http://www.sarahevansdesign.co.uk/)

Both have a Featured Work page. It is better on both than yours.

Also why is the Contact Form so tiny? It feels like it was pasted onto the page with no thought to how the rest of the page looks. Like tiny hard to read text boxes are never nice. Go look at Microsoft's Microsoft Account signup page, that's how big textboxes should be.

The image behind the "HI, I'M DOMINIC MONROE WEB DEVELOPER" stuff is so fucking huge that's almost all I can see when I load the page. I can just see the top of your heads in that photograph. What resolution are you developing for? And why is that image so important to your product? Is THIS[0] really the most important thing on your site? Not, you know, content...

[0] [https://static.pexels.com/photos/3925/desk-ruler-designer- ch...](https://static.pexels.com/photos/3925/desk-ruler-designer-chair- large.jpeg)

<comment><AUTHOR> I had intended it to be for anything. I know a lot of languages, can pick up more, and an API can be learned. As I charge a flat rate, I'm happy to figure it out. However, due to the confusion, I'm going to try rewording it.

I've worked with a previous client who was editing the HTML live in production. I helped them create split dev/production areas, and use a git- based workflow so they could try out changes in development, and then migrate them to production safely when they've checked their changes are okay. Again, clarity is going to be attempted here.

A lot of them don't have a "View Live" due to them being API/backend work. So I haven't prioritized. I absolutely love Sarah's work pages. It gives a great amount of detail, but also provides a summary. Daniel's seemed to be a non- modal version of mine, but it greatly restricted the numer of items he could have.

I think I'm going to try pull my portfolio out into data, and generate additional pages for each. Then create a small brief or summary, and do a card-style design, with the images & summary below.

I'll reduce that, I think I got myself all caught up with the big, images used on techy websites. Or make it more relevant, either one.</comment></comment>