2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/23/a-crisis-in-communication/

<comment><USER2> What if you knew the depth of the mail queue of the person to whom you were writing, _before_ you wrote the e-mail? E.g., you are writing an e-mail to your boss, and when you start writing, you see that he or she has 150 unread e-mails. Might you change your mind and decide that it either 1.) wasn't that important after all, or 2.) important enough to relay the message in person or on the phone?

<comment><USER3> Not a bad idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IDEA: A Karma "bank" for email.

I set up an account at emailkarma.com (sadly, taken, by Xobni, no less!) as a recipient. I set a default free karma amount (say, 100) for new senders, a default karma amount for unsigned emails (say, 50), and route all my email through the service. I also set up a whitelist of known good senders with an infinite karma balance.

People who email me for the first time will automatically be issued 100 karma points by the system. They have one of two options:

1\. People who don't know about the karma system can email me directly, but their emails will "spend" the default amount for unsigned emails. When their balance reaches zero, their emails get de-emphasized.

2\. People who know about the karma system can choose to spend their remaining balance with me by tagging the email subject with [karma: pointvalue]. Unimportant emails can be assigned less value, and if they absolutely need to email me, then they can spend more of their karma.

Incoming emails are sorted by date and by karma spend. I can reward relevance by giving them more points to spend, and/or by setting their default karma spend to a higher value. I can punish stupidity by adjusting karma accordingly. Webmail interface, or a thunderbird plugin, maybe?

Senders can view their karma balance for a given recipient and default spend (both uneditable) by emailing the service to prove identity and signing up.

Arrington, for instance, can reward good tipsters with more karma, and punish PR trolls by slapping them with a karma penalty.

You could apply this to other forms of communication, too-- your facebook/friendfeed, twitter, etc., though those would have to be passive (relevance weighted by karma balance, no discrete spend available per post/recipient).

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree, and YC is eager to hear proposals from startups working on cures for email overload.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't an email overload cure be the supreme complement to Xobni?

<comment><USER5> It was in fact what Xobni started out working on.

<comment><USER6> So what happened to change that?

<comment><USER5> They moved on to bigger ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to try to tackle a difficult but noble challenge like this, but I myself do not suffer from email overload (having a simple life where no one cares what you think has its perks) so I'm really not able to empathize with people like Scoble or Mike Arrington. I'd probably do a crappy job of things.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not so sure about this one. There's massive selection bias: people with the ability to complain to thousands of people are exactly those most likely to be suffering from email overload. It certainly seems to be a growing problem, but I haven't heard my mom, dad, or sister complain yet. I'll let y'all know when they do. :-)

<comment><USER9> A data point in point: I'm working for a very big company at the moment.

The biggest span of control (direct reports) is 12. The number of people with an indirect span of control of greater than 200 people is about 100.

...mind you, that 100 have a lot of money to throw at solutions. Which is why they already have secretaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The thing with email is that it does not require much of a time commitment from even the sender.

Older methods of communication like a phone call or in person meeting require the person who initiates the conversation to invest some time in getting what they want from the conversation.

Let's assume that the majority of the emails received are primarily for the sender's benefit (ex. "please tell me what you think about x for my project" "Could you do an interview for y?"). These messages should get the lowest priority and could even be deleted if they can't be answered within a week or two.

The next set of emails are of mutual benefit to the sender and receiver (such as conversations between clients and companies, friends to friends, and _productive_ internal corporate communication).

The final category is emails for the receiver's sole benefit. Automatically generated emails _should_ be in this category, if they are to inform you that your credit card may have been compromised. Most emails here don't require a response from the receiver. Spam and marketing materials do not fall into this category.

Of course in each category you could drill down by priority depending on the situation.

<comment><USER11> If we had a good way to send and receive money through the Internet then it might make sense to charge a fee to accept an incoming email. One would have a whitelist of senders who get automatic refunds. Everyone else will be spending _real_ _money_ to send you email.

A tiny "postage" fee might also solve spam.

<comment><USER10> I think that you might be on to something with the fee in the sense that you could apply a solicitation surcharge to unapproved senders. It would only work if it was guaranteed to get your response, otherwise it's not worth it.

What about a separate email address (or even domain) for premium email? You could set the fee to receive an email (and adjust it to restrict flow to what you can handle), and refund people who don't get a response from you within x period of time. Certain senders could be excluded from paying. The senders could even choose how much to pay (These emails were sent without payment. Those were.)

You then publish only that address on your site/blog/whatever, and give your personal address to friends and family.

This idea needs a lot of digging into to really see if it's viable but I like the concept. The potential downside is that the government might like the idea of email tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> anshu jain, who runs Deutsche Bank's investment banking arm had 2 full time PAs who read his email and filtered accordingly. They were paid 7 figures and were very smart. The top business people, I presume, don't read their email directly. It's all filtered.

As for Mike A, I presume a huge inbox is party because he's running a huge and growing business, and has leveraged himself to the max. In that sense, it's no bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER13> The unmet demand may be closer to 10,000 a day for "high volume communication" and knowledge workers because there is a "shadow backlog" caused by the poor performance of the current approach. There are a couple of different categories of interaction:

I don't want to lose a key e-mail from someone new (e.g. a prospect) or someone I want to reconnect with (e.g. an old friend) in the midst of everything else

I want to have some answers suggested based on a collection of blog posts, a FAQ, or some other knowledge repository.

I want to recombine a number of e-mails into a complex branching thread because that's a work flow that a team I am a member of embraces (see [http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email- conversat...](http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-conversation) ) so that I have the full context for the conversation.

I want to make sure I don't lose touch with folks I have had a prior shared success with (I would like to boost my effective dunbar number).

There are several others. Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to continue the conversation. I think this is one area that is overdue for a significant change in paradigm, the evidence that the current approach isn't scaling can be found in a variety of secondary and tertiary coping behaviors that we have come to accept without attacking the root cause. I think there will be many approaches that continue to use SMTP as a transport protocol but enhance the user interface with embedded analytics and automation, as well as adding alternative forms of response to include blogging, wikis, IM, and VoIP.

see also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143878>

</comment><comment><USER14> If you read that and think "I have 24 emails a day; he must be getting about 100x as many pings for his attention," it might be worth reconsidering how people react to his email policy. If I wanted to get in touch with this guy, I wouldn't send an email. I'd send five, spaced an hour or two apart, with varying subject lines. One joke, one brief and ambiguous ("re:requested") one with caps, etc.

He'd probably be getting 400 emails a day if he didn't force people to resend anything they expected him to read.

</comment><comment><USER15> Or an opportunity for a secretary?

<comment><USER13> Even with a secretary it would be hard to manage 1,000 e-mails per day, much less 10,000 using the current e-mail clients. This would also be true of outsourcing it to a team of hardworking Estonians, Irish, Indians, or Canadians. Look at electronic discovery techniques (reading e-mail in a lawsuit evidence discovery process) where you may pay dozens of attorneys to sort through e-mail as another limit case of throwing bodies at the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would an urgency metric be a solution, allowing you to sort those 2433 emails to see the 50 that you really should reply to?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would require you to sort each email based on urgency, and the only way to do that (effectively) is to open and read the email. That's the problem.

<comment><USER16> Point taken. Perhaps some combination of the sender and subject could be a reasonable approximation? In my own experience, the sender almost exclusively determines the importance or urgency of any email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The simple solution: A mail client that doesn't say how many unread messages you have. If it's urgent they'll find another way of contacting you.

This is one of the great things about Twitter. Nowhere is there a "x twitters unread" on the site. You simply dip in and out as you wish.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hey kids, how about a contest?

Someone (not me) could create a control data base of say 2,433 emails. The data base could be downloadable.

Whoever feels like it could work on their solution and in x weeks or so post either a url for their new app, a proposal, or even a report based on the data. The rest of us could vote just as we normally do and the top 3 contestants could compete for the top prize of ________.

(I may be onto something, but my creativity is waning. A little help please. Any ideas?)

<comment><USER19> i really like that idea actually. having a controlled and constant data set, could provide a lot of insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If any system (attempting to solve this problem) allows one to add 2,433 emails to an "inbox", then it is doomed to fail.

Sometimes, it's the tool user, not the tool itself, that is to blame.

</comment><comment><USER21> In the world of vitamin problems, this is definately a pain killer. I wish I had time to work on a second startup and tackle this as well. Best of luck to those who do - I'm eagerly waiting.

</comment><comment><USER22> How about a Bayesian solution that observes how you answer emails, and prefills a reply (or automatically puts emails into trash) based on your historical reaction to similar emails?

<comment><USER9> Dear Mom,

Thank you for your recipe for fairy cakes. Thanks to my previous responses to e-mails containing the word fairy here are some links to soft core homosexual porn.

Yours,

Soon to be out of the closet Joe, who no longer trusts the guy tuning his auto-mail algorithm.

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hire an offshore personal assistant to read/sort your email?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd love to see something along the lines of <http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this problem is less of AI, more of HI; not so much a computing problem but more of a cognitive one.</comment>


T-Mobile offers phone plan without phone calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/a-phone-plan-without-phone-calls-t-mobiles-got-one/ <comment><USER2> Where are the news exactly? This is already available since a decade ago.

Take any SIM card from a USB dongle, place at unlocked smartphone. There you go.

I think in the US few people are used to the concept of switching SIM cards. In Europe this is normal practice.</comment>


How Sears Was Gutted by Its Own CEO - <AUTHOR> http://prospect.org/article/how-sears-was-gutted-its-own-ceo <comment><USER2> I'm old enough to remember when people like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens were famous for doing the same sort of thing. It's actually not bad in itself. The bottom feeders do play a valuable role in business, just as literal bottom feeders do in ecology. When animals or plants die, the process of converting its remains into a rich substrate for new life is facilitated by various organisms specialized for that task. So it is with dying businesses, and Sears really was in a precarious position already.

The travesty is that the business equivalent of beetles and worms and fungi reap such _disproportionate_ benefit from the process. They consume the entire husk themselves, leaving a metaphorical desert instead of rich loam. The leverage of having enough money to buy one company translates into personal profit and thus even greater leverage for the next buyout. That's how you end up with an economy dominated by termites, hollowing it out instead of helping it grow.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is done in my country alot - both by the government and CEOs. A road in my area has been in the works for a year now. Houses were demolished, shops broken, and the tarred parts of the road ripped to make a wider road.

All these were done months ago. Now the road is a dust blower when sunny. And a mud bath when it rains.

The road contractor is a private company called Arab Contractors. It's however rumored that the company is partly owned by a previous state governor.

The ex-governor privatized tax collection - and this company takes a princely percentage of collected tax.

He sold various state owned lands for pittance - sometimes directly to himself, other times through holding companies. And you know the best part? He used government funds to finance his private purchases.

He recently gave a land meant for a local government secretariat to a retail chain. I'm guessing he'll collect rent and more for the favor.

I think the law of diminishing returns applies to the criminal status of an act. After a certain number or scale, a crime is no longer a crime.

If a store manager sold inventory at half price to himself, or bought inventory from a supplier (a company he owns) he'll be in jail.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always felt there was way more to this cynical, vulture capital financial engineering than we have been told about. The shareholder lawsuits have shone a little light on Lampert's sketchy asset stripping behavior and slow motion starvation of Sears.

The successful lawsuit brought by individual investors who accused Sears of not properly overseeing deals to avoid conflicts of interest against Lampert, ESL, Seritage, and members of Sears' board of directors, which was won and cost Sears 44m. [https://www.scribd.com/document/338974154/Sears- settlement#f...](https://www.scribd.com/document/338974154/Sears- settlement#from_embed?campaign=SkimbitLtd&ad_group=35871X943606X8ab638dbad32c97fe3eda5300ebaa887&keyword=660149026&source=hp_affiliate&medium=affiliate)

you would think Sears board member Steven Mnuchin would now be ineligible for political office, but no... incredibly he's current United States Secretary of the Treasury as part of the Cabinet of Donald Trump.

</comment><comment><USER5> Candidate story for "Last week tonight".. wow terrible..</comment>


Ask HN:How to break out from online freelance marketplaces to find quality work? - <AUTHOR>

hello all
i experiment with freelancing as c++/java developer for 2 years mainly along with my day job in well known freelance marketplace site.
i probably dont need to tell you folks how very hard it is to get good quality work there and get the pay that your work is worth.
i call it "red light district of freelances" . even though i managed to do very well there and got very high reputation for my work manly to learn how is it to be freelance.
but the pay is low .and i found out that employers that usually using those sites don't like to pay more if you keep working for them out side the site. (maybe a little more)
and the competition with the low bid'rs from developing countries is very hard.
BUT now as i want to go full time freelance i can't count on such site's. i want to get to known by people that needs contractors and willing to pay as i deserve. not 20$ for hour for c++ job hi.. i got 15 years experiences. and from where i am
my type of developer worth 70$ and more.
how do i break out ? <comment><USER2> Contribute to open source projects. As soon as you have commit access to gcc, you will be making at least $200k+ year, hehe.

But seriously, devote sometime to create your image, whether writing open source or giving presentations. It's good and it makes you more skillful. I actually love writing OSS, even more than money.

A good freelance job offer usually COMES to you. The one I've been working to I've got from a HN spreadsheet. I contribute to one of the libraries that they used internally in the project so... they accepted me at first sight.

I don't have your amount of experience and I make ~$40/h(which is low by market's standard!). Having good communication skills and being able to let your client have almost no overhead from managing you can clearly be VERY VALUABLE. It's actually the employer's dream to find someone like this.

I've also worked with bad freelance jobs: didn't pay me in time, codebase was shitty and so on. I advise you to drop ship and look for something else. I have pleasure when I work

Aim to be a contractor bringing way more on the table than just flipping bits skills. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah thanks, this is why it was important for me to try out to be freelancer before i intend to be full time freelancer , i know its hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We're building matchist (<http://matchist.com/talent>) to solve this problem by creating a place for quality developers to find quality work.

We've found that our clients prefer developers who are great communicators and can provide guidance on their projects. They're looking for partners, not just somebody with Rails skills.

As a few have commented here already, your written communication could be improved to help inspire more confidence in potential clients. (I mean this as constructive feedback, not criticism.)

<comment><USER4> Are you going to accept non-U.S. citizen developer sign ups any time soon ? I guess this is coupled to stripe offering their service outside of the U.S.

<comment><USER3> We plan to but don't have a timeline of exactly when yet. It is indeed coupled to Stripe at the moment, but it's also a conscious decision on our part to start small with what we know (US culture, law, and how it relates to freelancing) before growing into other countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently start working in freelance , and I think that the payment doesn't worth it ,and the employers are not generally serious, you keep waiting for the payment , and they usually don't pay , now I deliver work like a demo , it only works for a few days , just so that I can be sure they pay . ps: what websites do you use ?

<comment><AUTHOR> odesk

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A developer that makes $70/hr is more than a developer - they are an architect, a persuader, a researcher and a leader.

In other words, soft skills, non-technical skills - communication skills. Yes there some recluses that can get top dollar and not be social but they are the exception.

<comment><AUTHOR> how much c++ / java 15 years experience take ? (Linux/windows server/client )

<comment><USER6> I hire on odesk regularly ( over 4100 hrs ). I would not hire based on the English structure used in your question. I don't think you would be able to communicate successfully. So personally not much.

So improve the English or find the subset of jobs that do not require English. (apologies for English being such a pain to learn)

<comment><AUTHOR> i have dyslexia its very hard for me to write in English but hi i craft great applications (: and i do understand you , and if we where talking in Skype i guess you could understand me very well also . 1200 hours in odesk and 5 star's reputations can prove it

<comment><USER6> Great. Glad to hear it.

Most communication I have with developers is in the form of comments and email - written communication.

High-end developers are doing more than creating their own code - they are commenting on ideas and design documents.

Your dyslexia is a barrier to communicating and persuading. How are you going to minimize its impact on your life?

Maybe you can try using a font to help - <https://www.google.com/search?q=dyslexia+fonts>

but in the end - it is your problem to solve.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Quit My Job - <AUTHOR> http://normalkid.com/2008/07/01/i-quit-my-job/ thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to speak.  If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in 2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become.  My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense. <comment><AUTHOR> thought people would be interested in hearing of a "success" story so to speak. If I had had a traditional 9-5 job, I probably would have quit in 2003-2004. but for various reasons it dragged out to 2008. I never really considered myself a "blogger", though it seems that's what I've become. My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

<comment><USER2> I love MacRumors because even though they are huge they are still are in some arenas an underdog (e.g. full-time staff of Gizmodo)... Like other blogs I am addicted to, I manually type in the site address at least once, if not twice a day.

> My other projects will not necessarily be blogs in the traditional sense.

Maybe we can look forward to some custom iPhone/iPod Touch apps that are a different way to read/change the way we read our news?

<comment><USER3> That's interesting. MacRumors.com is the only blog I manually visit every few days too. Almost everything else is in my RSS reader but for some reason I still visit MacRumors "by hand."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He's licensed to practice medicine. He doesn't need much luck. If everything fails, he has an enviable fallback.

<comment><USER5> How long can you not practice medicine before your skills deteriorate and your knowledge become obsolete? Probably just as fast as it happens to programmers.

<comment><USER6> Yes, because humans change as fast a computer technologies , right? I think that next week they will be putting out Lungs 2.0

Come on, if you are a doctor you can always be a doctor, in a couple weeks you can get up-to-date with the discoveries made in your field in the last 10 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> actually, the body doesn't change much, but medical practice changes a lot over a few years. Treatments and standards of care change pretty frequently, so you do need to keep up (if you are practicing)

There are required continuing medical education credits to maintain your licensure. And board certification expires in 10 years, so you need to re-take the licesnsing tests every 10 years besides doing regular education every 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So after all that work and school, you're giving it up for MacRumors? What led to your decision? Did you have a passion for medicine?

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably don't have a "passion" for medicine, but few people do. I personally don't know any doctors that truly have a passion for it. (I doubt, for example, that many would continue to do it if they won the lotto.)

I felt like I was good at medicine and enjoyed it day to day, but given the choice of doing it vs being able to just do something I was doing for fun anyway and spending more time with my family, I think the choice became easy.

The flip side to that, is I do have a passion for what I'm doing now. If I won the lotto, I think I would continue to run MacRumors, and still try to launch some other web projects I've had in my mind.

<comment><USER7> Really? You think passion for medicine is that rare? I sit in biology classes with my mouth wide open, in absolute awe at the principles that guide the human body. Then, when I think about applications of that knowledge in clinical settings (especially relating to the brain, in the same way that V.S. Ramachandran practices and researches), it excites me.

When I think about practicing medicine and helping people by embarking on a journey of diagnosis every day, I get the same burning sensation of excitement in my chest that I get when I think about starting a company.

I don't know how someone can endure the torture of medical school, residency, and then a practice without being passionate and absolutely in love with what they do.

Most of the "I quit my job!" posts I read here are about people who code in a dead-end corporate job who are escaping for entrepreneurship (still coding). You had a completely different, successful career that you gave up. I find that interesting.

(Also, I read MacRumors every day. Thanks for that.)

<comment><USER8> I've made a habit out of asking the doctors that I work with "Would you do it over again, if you had to?" I have about a 60% "Hell no" response rate. And, only about a 5-10%, "Yeah, I love what I do" response rate.

Especially nephrology. That's a brutal specialty. You watch most of your patients slowly die over 5 or 10 years while they are linked to a dialysis machine 3 times a week. The happy stories in nephrology are the people who get kidney transplants, but then you're only trading one disease for another: kidney failure for chronic immuno-suppression.

Congrats, on making it out! And, here's wishing the best for ya.

<comment><USER7> That's an extremely scary statistic. 60% an enthusiastic "no"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yeah man, as long as you have fun doing this Mac blogging, its worth it.

I hate Mac personally, but am happy to see you are willing to give the community the fullest. Love what you do!</comment>


Ask HN: Have there been many layoffs in the tech industry due to coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> We've been hearing about all the layoffs in the hospitality, restaurant, and other industries but I'm wondering if the effects of the coronavirus shutdown are now starting to affect the tech industry.<p>If you're currently still employed, do you fear that your job might be at risk in the coming months? <comment><USER2> There are companies that are directly impacted by changes (AirBnB, Uber) which are taking a hit.

There are other companies that directly benefit from the changes (Zoom, Netflix).

And then there are a bunch of tech startups that comprise risky investments and are very dependent on investor cash. Investors are very quickly going from open-handed to penny-pinching in the wake of the stock market crunch. These companies may be hit the hardest.

Outside of the above, I think in software it's mostly business as usual. Of course there will be those which are indirectly impacted as the whole economy recesses, but of all the places to be right now software is probably one of the best, between its tolerance for remote work and its continued usefulness while more physical industries are thrown a curveball.

<comment><USER3> Right now a lot of companies still operating are b2b businesses also, with lots of the client businesses taking hits. That hasn't necessarily trickled upstream yet, but I suspect it will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Indirect layoffs are coming. For example, if you are working for a technology company that is servicing Halliburton, who just laid off 5,000 workers, then there's a chance that Halliburton might decide to cancel that fancy new React project they contracted out to you.

Now, if your company's main client is Halliburton, then layoffs are coming for you next, maybe.

Another question is like, how POS providers like Toast, Clover, Upserve etc stay in business when their main client base are closed right now potentially even forever?

<comment><USER5> I've heard that Toast has let go 100 something new hires that were about to start there before their first day.

<comment><USER4> Sorry to hear it!!

I have a friend at a very small POS shop that just announced they are closing the whole company even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The workers impacted by this most across all companies (whether benefitting or dying from this) are the workplace staff. The people that keep the office running. Most of these people are hourly and only real purpose to keep the office lights on. When the office is closed, they don't have any purpose any more.

I have friends at various mid sized startups looking to lay off workplace staff because of office closures.

If you hired people to stock canteens, prep lunch, ensure the office is functioning, and now they're working from home, there's no reason to keep them around anymore.

The good thing is once offices open up again they'll need to hire them back. But who knows when that is.

</comment><comment><USER7> My consulting agency has already taken a significant blow in terms of client work and relationships. Any tech company providing external services for enterprise companies will likely be heavily impacted from my perspective. Companies are doing whatever they can to save money, and typically this means cutting ties with external services and partnerships before touching internal employees. This is heavily dependent on the industry, however, but something to be aware of if you are providing consulting services.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check blind.com There are literally hundreds of threads in the last week where multiple people have been let go due to coronavirus.

<comment><USER9> [https://teamblind.com](https://teamblind.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No. My primary job is a major bank. My part time job is military. Both are considered essential. If my primary were to eliminate jobs my part time job would voluntarily become full time.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are some industries that seem to be booming, so I bet they might need to hire (e.g. Instacart, Doordash, Netflix, Zoom), while others are probably hurting (e.g. Yelp, Uber).</comment>


Why I Won't Date An Entrepreneur: A New Series - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2011/10/28/why-i-wont-date-an-entrepreneur-a-new-series

<comment><USER2> Is this what some editor at Forbes thinks what blogging is? A generation ago Forbes featured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sitting on the cover together -- and now they've been reduced to "Meghan's dating adventures with her hipster now non-boyfriends". And no I'm not Bryan, Chris or Dave...</comment>


Automatic Deployment via git - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mobalean.com/2009/02/06/automatic-deployment-via-git

<comment><USER2> Yep git rocks and I think yours is a useful recipe. For my needs I prefer herokugarden to running my own server. Cname with them was a snap plus everything is free and if the need arises I can upgrade to heroku (rejiggered, currently in private beta). One thing that had me concerned at first was that I'd be stuck with a banner ad at the bottom of every page - but that's just their config/.yml scaffolding. Also their text editor is beautiful but I find I don't use it, for me TextMate and git gitter done. Their post yesterday on the future of deployment I thought was prescient: [http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/2/6/future_of_deploymen...](http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/2/6/future_of_deployment/)</comment>


How to train your brain to flip to a new language - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitesizeirishgaelic.com/blog/self-learning-non-widespread-languages/

<comment><USER2> I moved to a German speaking country about a year ago. I'm not brilliant at languages, but I've made great progress and most people are surprised to find out how little German I spoke a year ago. Here are some of my tips:

1) Use Mnemosyne every day. It is computerized flash cards based on the SuperMemo algorithm. Do not skip days. At around 2000 words memorized (9 months) the 'switch flipped'. At 2000 words you can have conversations with about anyone. Business is still hard, but smalltalk easy.

2) Read trashy literature - People, In Touch, Celebrity Rags... these are all written so 10 years olds can read it. Newspapers use bigger words and don't have pictures. Reading about celebrities is a hassle, but it helps and it an appropriate level.

3) Got kids? Turn the Wii and Cartoons to the foreign language. This makes your play time also a learning process.

4) _Do Not_ turn your computer to a foreign language. This will cripple your productivity. I am forced to work in German on a Windows box now and it is really awful and frustrating. Not recommended at all. Not one bit.

5) German Tuesday - Deutsche Dienstag - Every Tuesday was German Tuesday. Anyone caught speaking English to me had to pay a Franc into a Jar. If I spoke English then I paid. This make my German a fun game in the office. Plus we had Bier Freitag at the end of the week. I stole this idea from an outsourcing company I worked with where Tues and Thur were English only days.

UPDATE: For those learning German, the Mnemosyne flash cards on the website are mine. If you have any issues I am glad to update or help.

<comment><USER3> I like to read Harry Potter in various languages - works great for learning to read well.

Also, I created a website where you can practice vocabulary and verb conjugations: <http://inglua.com>

<comment><USER4> You're definitely not alone - "read your favorite (series of) book(s)" is an old trick.

<comment><USER5> This also works if you pickup a series halfway through, having read the first half in your native language, and then finishing it in the new language. I've done this with Harry Potter. Before moving to Canada at 14, I read the first 4 in Romanian and the 5th and/or 6th in English. Since many of the terms were found in previous books, or since i knew them from the movies (example quidditch which the translators decided to translate. Still not sure how they got with the Romanian term from quidditch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch.

About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation. While I did mostly general touristic stuff, I added some geeky points of interest to my itinerary such as Bletchley Park, Alexander Fleming's lab and planned to attend a StackOverflow conference. Meeting fellow programmers is always fun.

Now, I'm an Hebrew speaker, but speak English fairly well.

After about 3 to 4 days I made the "switch" and generally thought in English and spoke pretty fluently.

Towards the end of the trip (after about 20 days) I went to the StackOverflow conference, where I saw two of my programming idols, Jeff and Joel. At some point at the conference I approached the couple and we started to chat. Now, I hate to admit this, but bear in mind I was as ecstatic as a little girl meeting Justin Bieber in person. I was about 22 at the time and liked a lot of what they wrote on their blogs.

I know that generally people feel pressured when being treated as "idols" and these days I'm much better about these things, but at the time I couldn't help myself. All of this lead to me "forgetting" some of the English and (what I felt was) a much less fluent conversation, on my part. To make things more ironic Joel tried some Hebrew with me and I insisted to speak in English (which was a bit broken due to anxiety). After 20 days in English speaking countries it just felt too awkward for me to speak in Hebrew. Maybe it was awkward for me to speak in a language foreign to the rest of the group or just the anxiety that kicked in and I'm making too much of it. I don't know.

Why ironic? Here I was, a native Hebrew speaker from Israel, unable to speak in my native tongue while a former Israeli, practically his entire life living in the states, tries to speak with me in Hebrew and unable to.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of plain capability. When thinking about programming I can think simultaneously about how to express an idea in different programming languages/paradigms. This is another point of interest, how is thinking in other languages compares to thinking in different programming languages.

tl;dr: It seems to me there is more to the switching metaphor than developed in the article. When getting into the flow of a language it may be harder to operate in a different one. Moreover, as programmers we are all too familiar with thinking in different programming languages and it's interesting to see how it all relates.

<comment><USER7> For me it doesn't really feel like a switch (unless we talk about a very fast one). I tend to mix thinking (and sometimes speaking) in English and Polish to the level they blend together - sometimes I express separate phrases or even words in another language just because it "feels better" this way. Similarly for programming languages - I tend to mix thinking in them with thinking in natural language.

I do agree that those two issues - thinking in programming and natural languages - might be connected. It somehow feels similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> tldr (actually, it's quite short and worth reading) - practice sub-verbally as much as you can. If you see a cat, you think "there's a cat" in your head.

2 advantages I think this has:

1) It's good practice.

2) You will find holes in your vocabulary, and that that will encourage you to fill them.

<comment><USER9> This. Subverbal thinking IS the switch. When you start to think in a language, or even dream in a language, that's when you know the switch has flipped.

<comment><USER10> Do people dream in a specific language? I can think in more than one language, but my dreams are abstract, rather than verbal.

<comment><USER11> I have a bilingual friend who claims after spending few weeks in Australia or Japan his dreams switch to the local vocabulary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would strongly disagree with "It's like feeling that unexpectedly, you have a button in your brain. When you push it you can get thoughts straight to your target language." being the level of "at least being able to interact with locals".

In my personal experience, that's a point well beyond that. I was speaking fluid english for considerable time before being able to think in english on a whim. I can (usually) get my point across in german and russian, but thinking in those languages? No. I'm still translating to and fro in my brain, still formulating what I want to say in a language I feel more confident with.

<comment><USER13> From my experience, it takes total immersion in the language to become fluent. I spent two years in Brazil and it took 6-8 months before I reached the point where I began to think in Portuguese. It's a pretty amazing thing though, once you reach that point. You're thinking and even dreaming in another language. I still have dreams in Portuguese even though it's been 15 years since I returned to the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> He suggests little flash cards as a way to casually practice language on a daily basis, I have a bit of a more geek-oriented suggestion: change the language of your browser.

You'll start seeing sites you use every day in the foreign language (like Google products), and become very familiar with the words and phrases used in the UI. You won't be practicing the same sort of phrases you'd use in every day spoken conversation, but you'll definitely learn something. (And it shouldn't be too annoying for you to use the translated interface if you're already used to the product).

<comment><USER15> Some soccer players in Europe who transfer clubs to another country will get sticky notes and paste them to everything in their apartment to get used to nouns. Of course, there's always players like Eric Cantona who used to deliberately talk in French to the English media to throw them off.

<comment><USER16> when I lived in Ireland I had such stickers in irish in my kitchen (they were already there). I still remember a few words, so I believe it works. Too bad you seldom use "fork" or "drawer" in normal conversations :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit"

Pretty good advice for any challenging task.

Also, how cool is it that irish gaelic of all languages would get such a pretty website? I can easily imagine these becoming a series of sites, like the X pod 101 series. I would absolutely pay $15 a month for bitesizeicelandic.

<comment><USER18> Haha I would pay for that, too. I'm fighting my way through Icelandic (post it notes, reading, tweeting occasionally) and any help is always welcome. If you want to do some "mail exchange in Icelandic" to practice with someone else, please drop me an email!

<comment><USER17> Alas, I'm not really studying Icelandic at the moment--too busy learning Mandarin :)

I went there on vacation last spring and fell completely in love with the language (and the landscape!!), so I would definitely start playing with it again if I could find some fun, easy resources...

<comment><USER18> I also felt in love with the country, but so far no "fun and easy resources". Also, it is a heck hard language, so far it is the hardest grammar I've found (although looks like gaelic grammar is hard, too), the declension rules are nightmarish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In my opinion, the most important word in this post is 'phrase'.

I'm learning Chinese and the only way to translate English to Chinese is complete phrases / sentences. You can probably cheat much easier if your languages are more similar, but don't get lazy, think in phrases or you will never reach fluency.

</comment><comment><USER20> The number one language tool for me these days is parallel texts. I grab ebooks in my target language, along with their english translations, and I use some open-source software called "hunalign" to create a sentence-aligned text.

Hunalign is an amazing little piece of software that will figure out which sentences correspond to which other ones in the second text, independent of language. It uses some neat algorithms to find the correspondences using sentence length, and then builds a partial dictionary and rematches.

At the end, I get a two-column version of the book, with one language on each side, with sentences matching in each row. As I read in my target language, I can just glance over to the equivalent English on the other side in order to get the meaning.

Reading is the fastest way I've found to really get an intuitive sense for the language's grammar and to learn tons of words. And the whole process goes much faster with parallel texts. I learned fluent German through reading, and now I'm working my way through Dutch. I started Dutch in January, and used parallel texts to read through the Harry Potter series while listening to the Dutch audiobook versions of them...now I feel quite ready to jump into non- parallel Dutch novels.

More info available on my parallel text process coming soon on my blog: <http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll repeat my site comment here: A more efficient way is to use Spaced Repetition Software <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>.

You will spend more time in the items you don't remenber. Anki and Mnemosyne are good open source softwares for language acquisition.

Anki: <http://ankisrs.net/> Mnemosyne: <http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/>

There's a kind of art in creating your flashcards. It's important to follow the "20 rules in formulating knowledge": <http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm>

</comment><comment><USER22> Loved the comment about it being a "switch." This is exactly what I found when I went to Turkey after 2 years of studying Turkish. I was in a program where we had a 4 hour class in the morning taught about 80% in Turkish. The first week or two was terrible. Then the "switch" flipped. I wasn't a fluent speaker and still missed words and phrases while listening, but all of a sudden I could follow the class, do the lessons correctly, and ask semi-intelligent questions. It's a great moment when you're learning a language.

<comment><USER23> Which program? I did a month of the absolute beginner level at Tomer in Istanbul. I remember being so absolutely lost the entire class, but somehow I kept learning. I'm still not at the point where I can make the "switch," like I used to in Spanish, but that's more my current priorities. (watching two languages slip away... sigh)

<comment><USER22> I did the AATT/ARIT summer program at Bogazici in Istanbul. I thought it was a very good program, but very intense. I have heard some good things and some bad things about Tomer.

<comment><USER23> Tomer has some good teachers, but the admin side is one of the worst bureaucracy experiences I've seen. I've heard good things about Bogazici, including that they didn't let you speak anything but Turkish on campus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On a related note: it took 8 weeks of struggle coding daily to convert to C++. I would go home each day sweating and exhausted. At the end, a switch turned and the code would come out with much less effort.

Yeah, yeah, your favorite language is much easier than C++, I'm sure. But maybe it took something similar to get 'fluent'?

<comment><USER25> When learning functional programming (F#), there was a distinct point where I suddenly "got" functions and so many things suddenly made sense. I can actually remember the day and place where it snapped. (Perhaps if I had studied FP in school instead of just learning FP on the side after being conditioned by Basic and C, it would have been more natural.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A bit off topic: I consume a lot of English, and produce some (like there ;) ), but I don't have many opportunities to practice my speaking skills. As a result my spoken English is not as good as it could be. I assume some different part of the brain gets involved while speaking and mine did not have enough training :) I wonder is there some community where I could find native speakers willing to chat with me online—Skype, most likely–and help me improve? Paid services, if reasonably priced are OK too.

<comment><USER27> <http://www.lingq.com> has the option to either pay (it's pretty cheap), or swap (You give lessons in your native language to earn points, and spend those points on lessons). I haven't used it yet (I'm still too much of a beginner) but I hear people are quite good there. After your 15min conversation they'll send you a report of suggestions/corrections you can make.

Some free options, none of which I've used, are: <http://chatonic.com/> <http://www.italki.com/> <http://www.babelyou.com/> <http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/>, <http://www.sharedtalk.com/> <http://www.lenguajero.com/> (Spanish) <http://vraiment.info/parlezfrancais/index.html> (French)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is an excellent site to get started with a language: <http://www.livemocha.com>

</comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one who thought this post was about learning new programming languages ? ;)

</comment><comment><USER30> Raymond Chen has some neat posts on language:

"If somebody speaks a language I'm not expecting, sometimes I don't understand it, even though I should" Jul 6, 2009 [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/06/98183...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/06/9818300.aspx) (the last paragraph is particularly interesting)

"More musings on the peculiar linguistic status of languages acquired in childhood" Jul 7, 2009 [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/07/98209...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/07/9820997.aspx)</comment>


First Photos From Upcoming "MySpace News" - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,72960-0.html?tw=rss.index <comment><USER2> They're trying to compete with Digg/Reddit with *that*? It looks like Altavista circa 2000.

<comment><USER3> Firstly, based on the design of the rest of myspace, do you think the users care what it looks like?

Second, Most myspace users havent heard of digg, reddit, etc. To them this is going to be a wonderful new thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious, did an admin change the link to be direct to wired or was it done by msgbeepa?

<comment><USER4> To combat linkjacking, people with editor auth can replace linkjacked urls with the url of the original source. The original submitter still gets the karma points though; he was after all the one who brought it to everyone's attention.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand the motive behind the linkjacking. If ze is after a higher pagerank then ze should have noticed that YCnews uses rel=nofollow. If its karma then ze should have spotted that there is only karma gains when its a direct link. If its click throughs on the referal links then I'm pretty sure that the kind of people who read YCnews already have a paypal account and dont want to join payperpost.

Am I missing something?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to make website hosting innovative - <AUTHOR>

I'm building a data hosting company with a vision for exceeding any one customer's exceptions. Besides fanatical support and decent hardware, what are some great ideas to make my hosting company attractive to serious buyers?<p>For example, should I offer a bigger range of features (Mobile Server Management, 24 Hour Live Support etc.) or should I focus entirely on simplifying the process of getting one's website online fast? I want to go from Good to Great. <comment><USER4> Find someone (ideally, someone who has never even heard of HN) who is dissatisfied with the business results they get from their current hosting. Ask them why they are dissatisfied with those results and how much money it cost them. Ask them if they would pay 1/10th of that money for hosting which does not have those problems.

If the answer is yes, find four more people like that. If the answer is no, thank them for their time, forget the conversation happened, and talk to someone else.

If you go haring off into feature-land you'll find that nobody who cares about Mobile Server Management will pay you money for web hosting. The ones who need it won't trust their businesses to you. The ones who don't need it but like the idea of the feature have no money to spend but feel like they have all sorts of useful feedback about webhosting, including why they should have dedicated server performance with the responsiveness of their own engineering and ops team for no more than $4 a month. The people who urgently need better hosting will probably not even understand what that feature means, because it includes at least two works of tech gibberish.

P.S. Before you try selling a new hosting solution to anyone try selling a currently existing solution. If you can't do that, you have no hope of selling a new solution. You can learn this without spending six figures in hardware and engineering costs to build a new solution.

<comment><USER5> I've heard of HN and i'm dissatisfied with the offerings out there. I want to sign up for a service and have my small business technology problems disappear.

That means: \- Help me point my domain to your service. \- A built in CMS that humans can actually use, not a directory where I'm expected to shove html (What the fuck is html and can word make it?) \- email: Make my domains email, work without hassle \- file sharing - let me share stuff with others in my business. \- calendaring/meetings - duh, just make it work. \- wiki - <USER2> in, from the ground up.

None of this is technically difficult. But no one has put in the effort to make these things frictionless yet.

When I brought up the subject of a turnkey linux distribution for business 12 years ago at a meet up I got violently shouted down. I was told businesses HAD to have an LDAP administrator otherwise they would cease to function immediately.

I disagree. Huge amounts of effort have gone into making things technically possible, but very little has gone into making them _useful_ to the average business user. Have a look at hosted wordpress as a model for this sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best hosting experiences I've had are with Linode, AWS and Rackspace. Linode for their brilliant custom control panel - a key differentiator between them and those running stock control panels. Rackspace for the support - if I need to speak to someone, someone will pick up the phone in 2 rings or answer a ticket in 15 minutes. AWS for the fine grained pricing and ability to scale up and down at will.

All of the above are leading or close to leading in their respective niche areas. Their innovations and key differentiators appeal to different types of customer, product and price range, neither which you have stated. It is difficult to give advice on this basis, are we advising how to innovate $x/month bargain hosting or $xx,xxx/month enterprise solutions?

I think you have to identify these clearly before proceeding.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks. I like what those companies are doing but I'm already doing the same with shared hosting. I've already committed to really, really good support. I have integrated live support available most of the time customers are awake.

Basically I've got a dedicated server and a virtual server which I use to sell $x/month bargain hosting, just not basement bargains. Short-term goal is to be slightly premium as in $xx/month. I feel that fanatical support and stellar uptime on well-managed servers will make me a fortune in time.

So all that is identified already. In fact, I'm up and running. I just need a better way to get to my 20,000 accounts goal sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can think of two companies that have made web hosting innovative, and they've gone in totally different directions -> Amazon (AWS) and Heroku. Both solve very different problems, very well. So I guess the question is, who is your target market, and what is their problem? Also, check out prgmr.com - <USER3> me his motto 'We don't assume you are stupid.' solves my problem (having to deal with hosting companies that assume I am stupid).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I've not the access to a massive network with shiny new hardware so my target market is shared hosting for now. Just looking to give it a premium twist instead of playing the $x/month game.

I like that motto. My mantra was all about keeping it simple but that might be worth weaving into my support setup. Thanks for your input!</comment></comment>


Gmail adding prominent 'Unsubscribe' option to marketing emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2100020/gmails-unsubscribe-tool-comes-out-of-the-weeds.html <comment><USER2> This, contrary to what people might believe, is good for online marketing and for business. Here is why:

* You're much better off with a list of people who actually care about your communication and your product, rather than a list of people sort of interested or downright annoyed by you, which haven't unsubscribed because they couldn't find the link.

* Less disinterested subscribers means less costs to send and maintain the list (e.g., via Mailchimp or SES).

* Less spam reports which hurt your email deliverability (get enough of those and you'll be booted off sites like Mailchimp).

* People will have less unwanted commercial communication overall, and will be able to focus on yours (of course I'm talking about the selected group of people who are actually interested).

I welcome this change, and I say this as someone who runs a site that sends 50,000+ 'newsletter' emails per week. This to me is good news.

<comment><USER3> If this is good for them, than why no marketing email feature a prominent unsubscribe button at the top of the email? Surely it's not an original idea by Google.

<comment><USER4> If you use something like MailChimp (I think that's what many new businesses tend to use? I can't remember..) or one with pretty subscribe/unsubscribe page for every customer who uses the mailing list service, then the customer's customers will have the luck to enjoy opt-in/opt-out option. If your organization is still running some out-of-date, custom subscription software, then unsubscribe might be out of the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reasoning sounds sane (users marking mails as spam when it is difficult to find the 'unsubscribe' link). But I cannot believe there is no ulterior motive. If users unsubscribe from businesses' mailing lists, it decreases the value of such lists and increases the value of GMail ads.

So, I wonder if this isn't just a move to make an advertisement channel, from which Google extracts no revenue, less effective.

<comment><USER6> Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly.

Consider this - the two reasons I originally signed up with Gmail were because of the large mailbox (a feature) and the much more capable spam filtering (a feature). At the time I owned my own domains and had my own choice of web mailboxes on my own site, but there was VALUE to me to pipe all of my mail through Gmail to benefit from these features and then check it there.

One problem I have seen lately is the volume or automated mailings from websites that I gave my email address to _years_ ago has been increasing, and if you ever gave consent for one newsletter in 2005 it feels like you're now subscribed to their weekly update, their monthly update, special deals, hot news items, personalised suggestions, and notifications and you can only seem to unsubscribe from one _mailing_ at a time. You simply can't keep up unsubscribing from all of the people abusing your consent out there. This is a problem with Gmail addresses and non-Gmails alike today.

To me is sounds like Gmail is aware of the problem and trying to solve it in a creative way -> Ubsubscribe using your mailbox, not using their settings :) To me it sounds like another feature that will keep people coming back and choosing Gmail over other mailboxes, and if that's the case then they make more money from ads in the long run :D

<comment><USER7> "Whie Google makes their money from advertising, that doesn't mean literally every action they make is for the purposes of furthering their advertising directly. "

Don't be silly. This is hacker news. People are even cynical about self driving cars ("Now they can show ads while you drive!").

For example, I'm pretty sure the hacker news view of Calico is: "Google execs got together in a room and were talking, and realized they had a problem - people keep dying, and they can't show ads to dead people. They needed options, hence they formed a company to fight aging"

Maybe that's not cynical enough, maybe it's "Google is looking for the ultimate incentive to join G+. For every G+ post you make, they extend your life by a month".

In any case, Google essentially can't win. Past a certain point, you do enough stuff that some people don't like it. While you can focus on the user, and slow down how long it takes, you can't please people forever, and once they become cynical, they tend to stay that way.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, it's no so much cynicism as it is _skepticism_. By the stage in the game, we have more than enough cause to abandon the image of a softer, gentler capitalism that we thought tech companies were going to be in the late 90s to early aughts and look at then with the same critical lens we shine on other immense, oligarchic organizations.

I really love Twitch Plays Pokémon, because to my mind it illustrates so well both the beauty and the peril of any sufficiently large corpus of humans. Although at any given point in time it is moving at random, over bigger time scales it is clearly moving with _some kind of intentionality_. We can't say what Red is doing any given instant in time, but over the past 10 days it is clearly bent on progressing through all the goals in the game.

Anyhow, Google is an advertising company. It moves ads. That is the life blood of the organization. Most big decisions are made directly by the executive team, whose intent you can ascertain directly, but lots of smaller decisions are made by thousands of other people lower on the chain.

Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction. As a rule of thumb, I think Google has a tendency to punish or discourage all forms of non Google advertising.

On the plus side, this right now is clearly a net win for consumers. Sometimes things aren't as crappy as they seem.

<comment><USER7> "Clearly, over the long term, Google is going to optimize towards showing you more and better ads, and I think this move is oriented in that direction."

This is the part i don't get. Let's ignore this specific case for a second (so this is more of a lament, than a direct response to your argument about this specific case): In general, believing _everything_ is tied to ads shows a distinct lack of imagination on the part of HN people, who by and large i've found to be pretty imaginative. For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume _everything_ is tied to ads?

To be frank: Does everyone really believe Larry and the executive team are that dumb? That they can't come up with any business strategies that don't involve ads?

<comment><USER8> >For example, Google has been working on diversification for years, among other things, so why would one assume everything is tied to ads?

OK, well, broadly speaking, Google like all organizations wants to grow. The best source of growth is increasing revenue stream. Advertising, in turn, was 96% of their revenue in ~2012^1.

They're going to try to find other revenue streams. But advertising is clearly not going anywhere.

We're still figuring out how advertising is going to keep working. And honestly, advertising is huge money and is what is driving the fierce battle over mobile at the moment. Here we have what is possibly the last great expansion of fresh eyeballs, and it is crucial for the existing companies to figure out how to serve them ads. Hence Android and the WhatsApp purchase.

So. If you have a feature that in any way can improve upon 96% of their business, that glove will probably fit.

I mean, I doubt Google Cars is seriously so they can show commuters more ads. They have a deep capacity for machine learning, and they bought Boston Dynamics; I'm sure we'll see lots more Google automation in the coming years.

[1]: [http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/29/google- advertising/](http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/29/google-advertising/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's my personal algorithm for handling commercial email that appears in my inbox:

1\. If I'm highly confident it's spam, mark it as spam. (Very rare necessity singe gmail catches spam pretty well).

2\. Otherwise it's something I have subscribed for, perhaps without noticing (opt-in by default from some service I have used). Look for the Unsubscribe link, click it.

2.1. If the Unsubscribe link IMMEDIATELY unsubscribes me (landing in a page that just confirms I'm already unsubscribed), ok, then just delete the email.

2.2. But if ANY additional interaction is required--choosing a reason for unsubscription, having to click another button--after finishing this, I will also punish the sender by going back to gmail and mark the email as spam.

<comment><USER10> Why is the mailer asking you why you're unsubscribing a punishable offense? Mailchimp does this by default on any of their unsubscribe pages (which come _after_ you've been unsubscribed).

<comment><USER11> If a service puts me on a subscription list without asking me, and then at the unsubscription page throws a questionnaire at me as to why I am unsubscribing, I take that as dishonest behavior.

Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place!

Depending on how completely unrelated the subscription is to whatever I signed up for (say I signed up for online image hosting, and they start sending me emails about their fantastic paid backup service) then I mark it as spam even if the unsubscribe button is easy and single-click.

<comment><USER12> >Obviously I am unsubscribing because I never subscribed in the first place!

You never become uninterested in something after you subscribe?

<comment><USER11> Sure, that's another case entirely, and I wouldn't mark that as spam.

I was referring only to the cases where you sign up for X and you get newsletters and whatnot that's not really related to your use of X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't want to 'unsubscribe' telling spammers my email is valid for resell. I want to BLOCK spammers when I mark them as spammers, no matter if it is baby jesus reincarnated or if I personally subscribed to that list at the beginning unsuspecting an abusive spammer behind that mailing list.

I mark dozens of mails as spam everyday and I keep getting them back by the same sender.

Block means block, not unsubscribe.

<comment><USER14> Not to stand up for spammers, but this initiative looks like it is designed to work with "the good guys"; organisations that use services like Mailchimp and have unsubscribe mechanisms that work and so on.

It won't really help with people who just send stuff over and over to a home- made list that is kept in an Excel spreadsheet and never clean the undeliverables or unsubscribes out of it.

And it certainly wont help with the pills and stocks brigade.

<comment><USER15> If enough users press "unsubscribe" to a sender, and that sender doesn't stop sending them emails, this is a high quality signal that the sender needs to be blocked altogether.

If GMail's response to this kind of signal is aggressive enough, it also gives an incentive for legitimate-ish senders to offer one-click unsubscribe links, to decrease the number of cases where someone presses 'unsubscribe' but then doesn't jump through some second hoop.

So yeah, I'd say this has some advantages for dealing with a wide range of scum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They also added a "confirm subscription" button for double opt-in lists that you can use straight from your inbox without viewing the particular message.

Or maybe just tested adding it. Damn, I should've used it. I though it was neat.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ironic that Google+ marketing emails don't have a prominent unsubscribe button or even a one click unsubscribe option.

<comment><USER18> transactional emails are not marketing emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This will be nice for my common-name gmail account: <first initial>.<lastname>@gmail.com. It's fairly unusable right now because of all the newsletters Bob, Bill, Brandy, Briana, Brian, etc sign me up to.

<comment><USER20> +1. I wish double-opt-in were written into federal law. I'm so sick of John's, Jack's, Julian's, and Justin's newsletters :-/

<comment><USER21> +1. I have a personal email address of the form <first initial><second initial><lastname>@gmail.com and I get tonnes of misdirected mail from Sarahs, Samanthas, Sams and Sebastians. And that's with a second initial! I'm very close to moving my personal email to a vanity domain, for this reason alone. (It's also a bit smelly to rely on another company for your unique identifier.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm shocked that people who regard themselves as technically sophisticated haven't figured out what clicking on an unsubscribe link actually does.

1\. In principle and according to Can-Spam, all marketing e-mails should have an unsubscribe link.

2\. But clicking on the link doesn't do what you think it does.

3\. After you've clicked on advertiser A's link, he can't mail you again (not that some don't cheat and mail again anyway).

4\. BUT -- Advertiser A can _legally_ pass his "unsubscribe" list to advertiser B, or make it part of a widely distributed list for use by other advertisers, LEGALLY. Oh -- did I forget to mention that this is legal?

Before Can-Spam, the standard advice was never to reply to a spam e-mail. But for some reason, after Can-Spam, people got the idea that it was their civic duty to click "unsubscribe" links, even though this identifies your e-mail address as read by a human, and thereby makes it a hot property in the spam business.

Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse, and that otherwise _nothing has changed_?

<comment><USER23> > Why don't people understand that Can-Spam just made things worse,

CAN SPAM was an unusually honestly named federal law to preempt the restrictive anti-spam measures states were adopting and ensuring that marketers subject to US law _can_ _spam_ consumers.

This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered.

<comment><USER22> > This was widely observed at the time the measure was being considered.

Indeed it was, even by politicians informed on the issues, but to no effect at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So how does this work exactly? I'd assume it just looks for a link in the email that says "Unsubscribe" and just makes that same link more prominent, but does anyone know for sure?

I wonder how it identifies the link? CAN-SPAM doesn't require the link be called "Unsubscribe" \- it could be "Stop Receiving Emails From Us" or something like that. Hopefully it will avoid false positives like a patio11-type informative email with a link to an article on "Limiting the Unsubscribes" or something.

I ask because it seems like a useful feature and I just want to make sure that my site takes advantage of it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a good feature but the issue is that even if you unsubscribe from a mailing list some will not actually unsubscribe you.

Also i found out a while back that after unsubscribing from some lists i started getting a lot of spam from all kinds of lists to which i never subscribed before which let me to believe that some mailing lists will actually release/sell their unsubscribed lists to others. Btw this was tested on brand new email accounts with only one mailing list subscribed at the time.

</comment><comment><USER26> Now give me a filter

        has unsubscribe link > mark as spam

<comment><USER27> Just because you can unsubscribe from something doesn't mean it's spam. Your statement just means that you don't know what "spam" actually means.

<comment><USER28> I do not subscribe to newsletters. Period. If an email sent to me has an unsubscribe link, it is most certainly spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surprised no one has mentioned [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2369.txt)

I hope this means Gmail will now support List-Unsubscribe in their UI. Last time I checked they didn't with my own old email marketer: [https://github.com/kaihendry/sg- hackandtell/blob/master/list...](https://github.com/kaihendry/sg- hackandtell/blob/master/list/maillist)

</comment><comment><USER30> If find it silly that someone can defend spam as a legitimate "business". Spam is always undesired and must die. In general all advertising over email is just noise.

<comment><USER31> lists aren't always advertising.

I had a list for people who read my books and want to get early previews of new material - kind of insiders view into new thinking, more an irregular newsletter than any form of advertising. every single person manually subscribed to the list, there was never any spam, but e-mail open rates on the list have been dropping over the last few years to the point that I stopped sending it out last year. Of course, content might be at fault, but the engagement among the group that opened the e-mail was still good, so I guess this was collateral damage of the general trend in fighting circular e-mail.

I read an article in HBR a few months ago that people mostly now get notifications on mobile devices, so the logical step for promotional marketing (soft spam) would I guess be to move to mobile apps. the stuff that I was sending out wasn't really suited for that, but if I started the whole thing again I'd probably do it with a mobile app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> THANK YOU Gmail!

I tend to do quarterly purges of the periodic emails I find myself subscribed to. This is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER33> A long time ago I created a filter that takes any message with the words "unsubscribe" and put it into a folder with the intention of writing something to go through and auto-click unsubscribe at some point.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was in some A/B test of this a while back and it's awesome. Can't wait for it to be rolled out.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is anyone else getting a completely broken SSL/TLS certificate from this site?

</comment><comment><USER36> Outlook.com has been doing this for a while. Seems that GOOG took a cue from MSFT, no?

</comment><comment><USER37> pot, kettle black

how do I unsubscribe to google ads

<comment><USER38> [http://www.google.com/settings/ads](http://www.google.com/settings/ads), click Opt Out,

or

[http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt- out.html](http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Awesome. I've been fighting to unsubscribe from things for 3 years. From catchall filters that insta-delete to battling inscrutable unsubscribe pages, I'm pretty close to no spam.

I wish I could unsubscribe from everything at once.

<comment><USER40> Maybe they'll allow you to search for emails that have the unsubscribe button in your archive/spam/trash and then mass unsubscribe from them.</comment></comment>