Interactivity – The Core of Video Game Aesthetics (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://objectivevgaesthetics.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/interactivity-the-core-of-video-game-aesthetics/ <comment><USER2> I like the article but it left out one of my favorite things unique to video games, _ludonarrative dissonance_ — the phenomenon that the actions you perpetrate as a character can be entirely antithetical to the internal moral state of the character or the motivational state for achieving a certain goal.

One example is the recent _Tomb Raider_ reboot. You play as a distressed teenage girl who is shipwrecked on a dangerous island with no survival skills or knowledge of self-defense or hunting.

Yet later in the game you are brutally murdering hundreds of enemy combatants by stabbing them with a homemade ax, shooting them with arrows in the head, lighting them on fire.

On one hand you are just trying to survive, find missing people, gain intelligence about the island you're on. Needing to kill someone would only happen in an extreme situation, and you would be desperate to run and hide or use weapons to incapacitate rather than kill. On the other hand you function nearly as a harbinger of brutal and complete annihilation for the groups of enemy foot soldiers, mowing down hundreds of them, using anything in the environment to brutally kill them.

You aren't a fallen anti-hero in the game's world though. You are the thumbs- up, wholly moral protagonist, but the actions you perpetrate go far beyond anything justifiable for mere survival.

I think this effect is also something unique to specifically video game story telling, because it's very hard to depict a character acting directly antithetically to the moral character the reader/viewer is supposed to believe they really represent, without entering some type of morality surrealism.

But in the game, since you are asked to _be_ the agent who perpetrates the irreconcilable actions, you are more willing to engage the dissonance aspect, and _feel like_ the brutal, unjustifiable actions don't negate the character, since you "had to" do it to complete the game.

The _Uncharted_ series also contains a lot of ludonarrative dissonance, as you are a cheeky Indiana Jones character who at root is a "good guy" just out for treasure, but who ends up brutally murdering thousands of bad guys along the way in over the top, morally indefensible ways.

The _Metal Gear_ franchise has components, especially with the Raiden character, that touch on it too.

<comment><USER3> If you're referencing the amount of absurdity that can only be conveyed in video games then I agree. Ludonarrative dissonance is the uncanny valley of gameplay plus story telling.

<comment><USER2> Huh? I don't see how they are related. Many games ask you to complete objectives using means that are perfectly in-character, and there would be no ludonarrative dissonance. But as a medium, video game storytelling creates a unique opportunity for optionally using ludonarrative dissonance as a factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's this part that is a strength of video games: "One of the most fundamental principles of storytelling is to have a protagonist with whom the audience identifies... Video games are better at establishing a connection between the audience and the narrative subjects ... because ... the audience does not merely passively observe characters, but rather actively controls them."

However, _curation_ is also a core component of storytelling. And fundamentally, it's hard to force a player to look in a particular direction inside a video game (hence the need for cinematic cut scenes, where the medium reverts to a movie format). IMHO, this is the biggest weakness of VR, and if somebody can figure out a solution to this, they will have created the next entertainment format.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think "power fantasy" is central at all to the appeal of videogames. Rather, the things that can really easily be modeled by computers happen to be... casting rays from point a to point b, changing an objects position based on its heading and speed, bouncing two things off of each other, or, to put it simply keeping track of a bunch of values that interact in a linear fashion...

There just isn't a whole lot more you can do well other than having the stuff on screen either bump into each other, shoot each other, or punch each other, or move and jump around (preferably all at the same time if you want something fun). I don't really find anything empowering about the whole process, it is just interesting to see stuff happen on screen and solve little puzzles and there isn't really any other type of game available.

If we had a tea party simulator where you poured tea for virtual friends and had riveting virtual conversations I'm sure that would be insanely popular (I'd play it just after I finish this game about ordering lots of dudes to run around a map and shoot each other). It's just that we don't have it because your virtual friend needs to be something like a strong AI to carry out a riveting conversation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ebert was right: games are not art. Video games can be composed of many different art forms, but the core game-ness and interactivity that make a game is not art. The rules or game-logic of chess and League of Legends are not art.

Instead, games are more akin to novel mediums, like musical instruments. A guitar is not inherently artistic--it _could_ be crafted by an artisan and composed with beautiful visual design, but it could equally be produced in a factory without a hint of human emotion. Both cases are still a guitar; they have the core feature of _interactivity_ : tap a string, hear a sound.

Therefore, while games are not art, playing a game _is_ art. Art in the sense that the artist is expressing themselves, or performing, on a medium of their choice. Obviously, this varies across games depending on how interactive they actually are (as opposed to being mainly movies). Many enthusiasts of chess see a grandmaster's performance as art, both as a performance art and a persistant art form (there are books written on single games or even moves, albeit the latter from a purely analytical perspective).

To me, shoehorning games into a box of art-as-products is not compelling, and counterproductive to understanding games and the video game industry. That is, the AAA industry is infamously bad to work in relative to other software subindustries--it's certainly no game designer' paradise, a free-spirited realm of artistry. AAA video games are massive feats of engineering, not works of art (notwithstanding the obvious components of visual and audio design). And on the consumer side, we see the continued growth of esports, livestreaming, and other niche performance mediums like speedrunning.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree about the performance art aspect of games, but I disagree that this means the game design itself is not art. Play within the ruleset is made possible by the deliberate constraints proposed by the designer, who (if skilled) has considered the range of performances encouraged and allowed. Plenty of art is deliberately ambiguous; ceding some part of the work to a participant doesn't immediately kill the author.

I can't comment on how useful this is for understanding the industry, but it is essential for looking at the works.

<comment><USER6> What you describe sounds a lot more like "engineering" than "art". Defining art as "making things" is not very helpful IMHO, because then everyone and everything is an artist/art and the terms lose meaning.

Game development is a massively complex undertaking[1] and designers' self- expression will quickly cede to the large number of technological and engineering concerns.

[1] [http://www.gameenginebook.com/img/fig-runtime- arch.jpg](http://www.gameenginebook.com/img/fig-runtime-arch.jpg)

<comment><USER7> I do tend to err on the side of inclusivity, but I don't think it becomes meaningless to say that anything _can_ be art. Is there anything physical that can't be made as sculpture? There is engineering and craft in most art to realize it in a permanent form. I disagree that unbridled self-expression is a requirement, heck limitation is often the _enabler_.

Maybe I'm missing your point, though, and it sounds like I'm saying everyone with a paintbrush is an artist. Certainly many games, even those much less complicated than your game engine diagram, are just made to "work": look pretty, hook players, shift units, sell replays. But I think we can criticize these games for what they lack just as we would for poor visible or audible aspects. We can recognize the existence of an "art film" on the same spectrum as a popcorn-munching AAA blockbuster, if maybe at the shallow end.

I'm not very well-versed in this argument, though I know it has been going on for a long time, sorry if I'm boring you with the easily-rebuttable stuff. I may be trying, as a former game developer and hobbyist game designer, to appropriate something that is better understood much differently. If art has to be the pure expression of one mind, unfiltererd through commercial necessity, engineering, and cooperation, then I have it wrong. I wonder if there's a better term for whatever it is I mean, entertainment doesn't seem to do it justice.

(Edit) fwiw I am trying to understand where you're coming from, too, sorry if this got too argumentative. I was intrigued by your observations about playing games and just a bit confused why you seem to reject game design as an art, as small a part of the whole product as it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Venture-Backed News Readers in One Chart - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/news-reader-apps/ <comment><USER2> UBC's Zite (after sufficient training) was consistently excellent at surfacing high-signal content from a variety of sources. It declined after acquisition by CNN and has become nearly invisible after incorporation into Flipboard's "Cover Stories". Now that Flipboard has turned off the backend which powered the Zite app, the next best options are:

      - manually curate Twitter lists for reading in Flipboard
      - manually curate RSS feeds

In the age of burgeoning AI and powerful clients, it is tragic that we have such little investment in automated filtering where all data is private to the endpoint and portable between devices. Or public sharing of training data for news algorithms. Where is the GPL-equivalent for data at risk of being orphaned?

We need standardized legal clauses for startup founding engineers to deter "Orphan Software Works". E.g. source code is escrowed at the time of each acquisition, and if the acquired technology disappears from the market because all acquirers have closed or abandoned the product, it must be released to the public as open-source, with or without patent grants or training data.

Code and learning from dead startups can fertilize research fields for future crops, instead of disappearing into legal black holes.

<comment><USER3> I didn't realize just how much I relied on Zite until it was gone. I tried to launch it several times a day in the week after it was turned off.

If anything, Flipboard has taught me that the UI of flipping pages is best left to physical magazines, where each page can have enough information density to make it worthwhile. Maybe the flipboard flip action works better on a tablet; but on a phone I can't bring myself to use it, no matter how much of Zite's technology they fold in.

<comment><USER2> Flipboard has sadly hidden the Zite per-article training options in "Up Arrow" -> "Tuning Options" which is the last menu item under the Share menu. What was one Zite click (up/downvote) is now Flipboard's click, swipe, click, click.

It brings you to a dialog which offers:

      More Like This
      Less Like This
      Mute Site
      Report Site

Gone is the Zite option to whitelist/subscribe to a site, which was the equivalent of following an RSS feed. Tragic. At least medieval cathedral builders would leave behind ruins to remind future generations of what was attempted. Software just vanishes.

Note to News App Developers: read Claude Shannon on the role of surprise in information theory. If your app shows the same articles being regurgitated in every other app, there is no surprise, i.e. news or information. Zite excelled at surprise.

<comment><USER4> Flipboard is something people actually use?

I recognize the name as some crapware pre-installed on my Samsung phone.

<comment><USER2> It's useful on tablets when combined with Twitter lists. Each list becomes a Flipboard magazine, you can then flip through meta-pages with substantive link previews, surrounded by tweets. This gives the benefit of Flipboard's UX with Twitter's manually curated content. This use case is buried:

      Profile
      Following
      Accounts
      Service Name (e.g. Twitter)
      Your Lists
      List Name

Before it was turned off, Zite allowed their users to migrate their data (topics, white/blacklist, votes) to Flipboard. For longtime Zite users, there were thousands of data points. Sadly, that data has not resulted in a Zite- like filter of Flipboard's content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is literally the worst chart I have ever seen in my life.

<comment><USER6> W|hat|'s wr|ong w|i|th i|t?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not to be a debbie downer, looking at this chart hurts my head. I am sure there are many other ways to present this information in a __much __more elegant and clean way.

<comment><USER8> Like Twitter's Labella, perhaps!

[http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/](http://twitter.github.io/labella.js/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even a cursory Google search will show this data is inaccurate. See circa total raised. Here it says 1.7m but googling "circa investments" Angel list shows several rounds and closer to 5m raised.

Makes the insights hard to believe.

</comment><comment><USER10> I regularly use Pocket, and I think it'll keep growing in an age where you're constantly being blasted with interesting content and have to save it for later. I also see it having more potential than the other apps, with the new recommendations service and opportunity saving other media.

I wouldn't call it a "news reader" though, and don't think it belongs in this chart.

<comment><USER11> I also find I put stuff in there only to never take it out again.

A better designed product wouldn't let me shoot myself in the foot.

<comment><USER12> I agree. It should have a better way of making sure the "best" content for you floats to the top of your list, rather than going by recency.

I'm intrigued by the new recommendations feature though, which might actually be a reasonable way to leverage the social aspect of article sharing. But I continue to lament the lack of a good way to have real discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These news and reader apps have so much high value audience interest data that they should be very valuable (in theory), given enough engaged users, especially on mobile. Are they struggling to leverage the data to monetize for fear of alienating users? What's the disconnect here?

<comment><USER14> My theory is that it's a problem with the very nature of "news" with human psychology.

In short it's that The News is about sensation, what's new, what's uncommon. It's not essential for any of us to read the news every day ultimately. If someone important happens we will hear from it on our other channels incidentally. I suspect that none of us actually enjoy reading the news or watching tv news.

So - a news startup which needs mass appeal to take off has to appeal to all the same users that currently consumes news, right? But, given the opportunity on the internet people tend to avoid the normal sensationalist news if they are getting it somewhere else, why should I want to go to a news aggregator?

I believe there to be the disconnect because it's about targeting the mass market - but it seems as if more niche sites with niche audiences tend to be more successful.

I also suspect that news aggegrators pitch by saying "look at all this news! See how many sources the news comes from! Witness how our solution makes it easier to consume" without addressing why someone consumes the news.

<comment><USER15> > why should I want to go to a news aggregator

Why are you here? Admittedly, HN is about 40% news and 60% links to interesting tech stuff. But who said a "news aggregator" has to be 100% news?

<comment><USER14> (edits because xmas)

HackerNews is not mass market, HackerNews is niche. HN is also not "The News" that one would read in these VC backed startups.

So I am here because this is a successful niche site which is not a VC backed mass market site :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting. Anyone have any insight concerning interest in Flipboard? Its total funding is an order of magnitude higher than all the others.

Was there something fundamentally different about their approach?

For what it's worth, I wasn't sufficiently impressed with any of the services mentioned to regularly use any of them, except Pocket, which I only use because I feel like it's the least-worst option.

What's interesting is that I _knew_ about 90% of these services when they were launched, so it wasn't a marketing/reach problem.

<comment><USER16> The fatal flaw in all of these startups was they just aggregated content. None of them solved the real problem of distilling the overwhelming amount of content online into the few thing(s) I should read.

<comment><USER17> That's probably fair. The quest for personalized news predates most people being on the Internet [1] and I think it's fair to say that no one has really come up with top-notch, personalized curation that blows people away. In practice, it's easier to let social media, RSS readers, and sites like this one provide you with a river of potentially interesting content that you skim and dive into as appropriate.

I'm also not sure how much people would be willing to pay even for really good content curation even if such a thing exited. And the reality is that curation is hard because my interests on a given day depend on so many factors from how busy I am to my mood to some event that piqued my interest.

[1] [http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309](http://news.mit.edu/1994/newspaper-0309)

<comment><USER3> I found that Zite did an incredible job of presenting high-signal content for me. I became so reliant on it that I would have paid a significant amount to subscribe, probably on the order of a spotify subscription. But that was after years of use and training; I can't imagine anybody selling me on a curation service at any price without that experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why on earth would they make the chart at subject a compressed jpeg?

</comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately for them, Yahoo may have stopped acquiring companies, but otherwise I would imagine HRH Marissa Mayer would have brought flipboard for $2B+. I know they try buying everything shitty.</comment>


Toshiba Introduces New Tiny NVMe SSD Form Factor - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/14711/toshiba-introduces-new-tiny-nvme-ssd-form-factor <comment><USER2> I can definitely see the perks of the form factor here, and totally see SSD cooling hardware as being the next big thing, and it sounds like they're prepared for that here.

But I mourn how fast the interface format is changing now, because I don't have the hardware to support all of these formats. I've got a handy USB to SATA adapter that did the job for, I don't know, a decade and a half, and now there's eight different types of SSD sockets out there.

<comment><USER3> I think this new format is nice because it requires no tools to install, like most other components e.g. RAM.

In contrast, current M2 NVMe have this annoying screw that requires a fairly specialized screwdriver and tends to get stuck in some motherboards. Not a good design. So Toshiba's new form factor looks like a step forward.

<comment><USER4> I refuse to replace my NVMe for this reason alone. That screw is going to get stuck somewhere and I'm going to have to take the motherboard out completely to get it, hoping the whole time I didn't fry anything.

Why. Why make a screw that small. It's torture.

<comment><USER3> It sucks. Lots of NUCs come with a very small capacity Optane drive already installed. Many users want to replace it with a regular SSD. The nasty surprise is that the screw is overtightened. So when they try to unscrew it, a common outcome is to ruin the motherboard.

<comment><USER5> Some laptop modding anecdotes: Thinkpad X61's mini-PCIe Wi-Fi adapter has the same problem and is well-known among hardware modding users - the screw is tightened and glued in place. When someone tries to unscrew it, one must carefully apply a torque with a high-quality screwdriver, otherwise the consequence is ruining the screw. I made the mistake and killed that screw when I first encountered that screw.

Fortunately there was a simple fix: just use a Dremel tool to cut the screw through the circuit board of the Wi-Fi adapter. The PCB of the Wi-Fi adapter is ruined, but you can now replace it and install a new screw without a problem. ( _and I think the ground plane is under the screw, just copper without other traces, so the original card may even be fully working, but if you 've spent so much trouble to remove it for your upgrade, it's definitely not something you'd like to continue using..._)

Since then I went to get a set of high-quality screwdrivers and never had the same problem on other similar machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wonder if we'll see these on the Raspberry Pi 5 and other embedded boards?

This is pretty amazing; much better than the current eMMC and SDCard based storage solutions on a lot of dev boards.

<comment><USER7> RockPi has a full size M.2 connector that accepts most NVMe drives:

[http://rockpi.org/](http://rockpi.org/)

<comment><USER8> I bought a Rock Pi 4 and the whole kit-n-kaboodle. Just finished doing some benchmarking and it has pretty impressive performance, but it definitely needs assistance staying cool. The case I have is aluminum with the bottom of the case being a whole-board heatsink, and I still had to set it on top of ice packs with a fan blowing to keep it from throttling under heavy benchmarking load.

I think one thing people don't think about with SBCs is that we are making pretty significant thermal performance trade-offs. I wish somebody made a case with a clean flow through and at least 1 120mm fan in it.

<comment><USER9> Or... you could make your own Extra Fancy case: [https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272](https://twitter.com/mrm/status/1157820493098934272)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket.

All things considered, that's not a bad looking socket system. With thermal limitation the issue, it seems BGA+heat sink will still outperform but at the cost of not being upgradable. Still, seems like a fair idea to have a PCIe4 MicroSD.

<comment><USER11> > We've come full circle back to primary storage that drops into a socket.

What are you referring to?

<comment><USER12> A cassette of course :)

[https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108](https://youtu.be/BnHW-f5ayhs?t=108)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Definitely nice for SFF... but I don't think that higher performing devices will be able to dissipate enough heat from the lid alone. Most PCIe gen 4 SSDs have relatively large heat spreaders because of the load.

Similarly, I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.

<comment><USER14> >I keep thinking it would be cool to have a GPU socket format that could sit adjacent to the CPU so that a large heat pipe / cooler could be attached to both.

That's pretty much exactly how modern high end laptops with dedicated graphics processors work

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something that I think people are glancing over, this has some huge potential in the laptop / pro tablet space. I don't think someone like Apple would ever move to something like this, but standard NVMe mounting solutions are probably taller than they need to be. This is also a screwless solution which while not a huge deal, is pretty neat.

In my eyes, this sort of connector gives manufacturers no reason to solder on storage. There's the cooling issue, but looking at something like the MacBook I could see it integrated into the CPU block or even the bottom case. Hell, if they did the bottom case it might even give some support to the logic board and they won't have as many issues with the board flexing. No rubber pads needed!

<comment><USER16> Who cares about laptops and tablets? They already have fast ports. You already can put a real NVMe drive into a USB enclosure and get ridiculously fast external storage.

This new form factor would be perfect for cameras that shoot RAW video or high-bandwidth video. Until recently you'd need to buy very expensive and fast SD cards or proprietary RED mags to be able to record high quality high resolution video. BMPCC4K was the first (very affordable) camera that allowed recording directly into a USB SSD.

<comment><USER17> Of course, the RED mags that you're referring to just use normal SATA with the pins moved around.

<comment><USER18> For context: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJXu4K1igg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJXu4K1igg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How is this an "innovative connector design"? This is exactly how sim card slots worked on many old Nokias, the mechanism is literally identical.

<comment><USER19> Innovation doesn't equal inventing new stuff. I think it is quite innovative how they use an old mechanism for a new use case.

<comment><USER20> It's not a new use case, it's still used to connect a card to a board. Just like the hinged connector used for microSD before this [0]. It's more USB 3.0 type A connector vs. the USB 2.0 type A.

Neither the connector itself nor the application are innovative. Which is why nobody is pointing out the particular innovation in the connector.

[0] [https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card- co...](https://www.yamaichi.de/products/connector-solutions/card- connectors/micro-sd-card-connector/micro-sd-card-connector-hinge-type.html)

<comment><USER21> Using it for a smaller NVMe SSD, however, is. Quite clearly.

You can call just about anything "not innovative" if you're sufficiently reductionist about it. The idea that the only "true" innovation is some totally unknown, totally revolutionary idea that came completely out of nowhere fully formed is a toxic one that robs people and companies of just praise for coming up with interesting and useful new things, while others get lauded for making a whizbang concept prototype that's never going to be commercially viable.

This is something no one has done before, even if many of the parts have been done in different ways. That's innovation.

<comment><USER22> I had this type of connector for memory cards in some old devices. This was a while before the push-push connectors came into fashion.

The requirements back then were much lower than what this connector delivers. No real need to dissipate heat or handle PCIe signals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Last week I purchased an NVMe drive for a small home server I'm building. Take into consideration the last time I bought components was about 6 years ago so it absolutely blew my mind seeing how small the NVMe drive was, like the size of a chocolate bar and barely more than 1mm tall. I took photos of it in the palm of my hand!

Seeing they're looking into shrinking these things even further is even more incredible to me!

</comment><comment><USER24> How it is comparable to microSD express(with pci-e 3.1 and nvme) announced February this year? [https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association- ann...](https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/286390-sd-association-announces- microsd-express-with-pcie-nvme-support)

<comment><USER25> SD Express is almost certainly going to be adopted by more people than Toshiba, for one. Though it could die like UHS-III.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would love a Raspberry Pi-like device with one of these sockets.

</comment><comment><USER27> Seems like a good thing for mini-PCs and laptops.

I am really into mini-PCs. Like the Mini-STX DeskMini GTX/RX is my favorite thing at the moment even though I don't really need it. It uses MXM (laptop) graphics cards such as even a 1080.

I am wondering, with an external power brick like the DeskMini GTX/RX uses, could you make the systems even smaller than Mini-STX? Maybe there could be a way to separate out the components package from a cooling solution that would be attached.

I like the combination of portability, easily plug-able components, and power.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe I'm too much of a sysadmin but this looks like they're trying to make a successor to the SATA DOM form factor that also works for embedded use cases.

</comment><comment><USER29> Cool! I read the announcement and visited the product page[1], but I didn't see any indication of when this will start to be available. Anyone have any clues?

1: [https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en- jp/product/memory/xfm...](https://business.toshiba-memory.com/en- jp/product/memory/xfmexpress.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> No mention of starting capacities...

<comment><USER31> They're only announcing the form factor today, not a final product. But we should see at least 512GB, and probably 1TB. Their current 1TB BGA SSD is a bit thicker than XFMEXPRESS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I worry about the spring force of those pins after so many extreme temperature changes. Or AMD spring connectors design are similar to these?

EDIT: I meant "Intel spring pin connectors"

<comment><USER33> It seems like it's basically like CPU socket spring pins, which I would assume have much higher thermal loading.

<comment><USER32> by just pictures Intel spring pins are shorter and broader on the base side and with a steep rising angle. These look (quite) longer and with a lower rising angle. I guess these pins are more feeble and imprint less force than CPU spring pins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The angle of insertion seems like a total deal breaker for any sort of embedded device.

<comment><USER35> I mean, you could create a different housing for an embedded device like a cell phone that receives the same card.

I remember when SIM cards used to go in at an angle and flip down like in the diagram, but now all the housings are just slide-in with spring loaded contacts.

<comment><USER36> Back when cell phones had removable batteries you'd just put a connector like this under the battery. These days it seems like a fairly major oversight. Maybe someone will figure out a slide in socket that will be compatible? Depends on how the pins are arranged on the memory card. It might be tricky to pull off depending on the pinout of the card.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Love the form factor and I hope to see something like this in raspberry pi devices.

</comment><comment><USER38> when all else fails, add another row of connectors!

</comment><comment><USER39> Not sure if this will end up in consumer devices but it would be a hell of a lot better than SSD chips soldered onto laptop motherboards. The latest ultraportables all seem to have soldered SSDs because once Apple did it and the world kept spinning, that made it okay for Dell and everyone else to follow suit. Of course the SSDs themselves would have to become easily available for people to upgrade their laptops or it will just be the next MXM standard, upgradeable in theory but no one actually does it.</comment>


How Coca-Cola shaped obesity science and policy in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.k5050 <comment><USER2> The sugar industry has a long history financing research. The obsession the US got in with salt, fat and 'red meat' were often financed by the sugar industry.

The results were the absurd situation where things would be sold as 'low fat' but had doupled the amount of sugar and is marketed as diet food.

<comment><USER3> Financed research with vested interests, though it may be, salt, fat and red meat can have palpable effects on the human body.

Salt is an implement of suicide, for one.

Red meat, I suspect, transmits all kinds of biological signaling residue from the original animal's state, even when fully cooked. From horomones, to antibiotics, to persistent organic pollutants, and then onward to your electrolyte changes required to produce the gastric juices for the quantity you've eaten. Muscle protein, though it may be, it's a carrier of all kinds of interesting artifacts, and when you start accepting ground beef, you even open up the window to prion diseases, since other tissues, besides muscle, sneak in.

Fat does have complications and side effects, now that we have a better concept of the way transfats interact with our metabolism, when they remain waxier and refuse to easily melt at body temperature, requiring more intensive effort to burn off. This means fried foods and processed food that deliver doses of transfat really do introduce a metabolic issue.

Food is complex, and refined sugar also adds problems. I don't find sugar addictive, but in high quantities, and when combined with these other gotchas, sugar is definitely a serious contributor to all the obesity and diabetes we see, for sure. Eat some extra donuts for a month to notice the difference. Actually, _don't_.

Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol are also complications, that seem to fly under the cognitive radar in these discussions. And are actually probably the worst offenders, in terms of seriously augmenting an unhealthy diet.

<comment><USER4> > I don't find sugar addictive

Try eliminating it from your diet and see if you still think the same! Seriously, for a few days you will _crave_ carbs if you stop eating them altogether.

> Red meat, I suspect, transmits all kinds of...horomones, to antibiotics, to > persistent organic pollutants...

Surely you could say the same about non-red meats such as chicken, pork and lamb?

> Red meat, I suspect, transmits all kinds of...persistent organic > pollutants...

You could also argue this for just about any vegetable, legume, fruit or grain crop too.

<comment><USER3> Carbs are a source of ordinary nutrition, so the cravings you experience aren't a clue regarding addiction.

Body chemistry has essential needs. You can't just drop carbs (simple or complex), feel a pang, and conflate as addiction.

And yeah, all meat transmits compounds besides protein. But.

Meat sourced from mammals is different. And genetic/evolutionary proximity matters.

Pork, for sure, is controversial according to religious food customs for a reason. Not just the perception of pigs as "filthy animals." Consider that boar taint is a key factor in selecting how to butcher pigs for their meat.

Plants are extremely distant, and the evolutionary pathways that have lead to biologically significant plants is on the other side of the predator/prey wall.

Plants do not operate lipids in ways similar to animals, and oil solubility is a key factor for how animal behavior and metabolism gets modified by nutrition. From vitamins, to horomones, to blood/brain barrier crossing agents.

<comment><USER5> Can you link sources to those claims?

For instance carbs are absolutely not essential [1], one can live healthy life without a gram of carbohydrates. So I'm interested where are you getting your information.

[1] [https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/75/5/951/4689417](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/75/5/951/4689417)

<comment><USER3> I don't have a single link for you. Gee, looks like you win the internet.

Except, just try it. Try to exclude them from your diet, and see where you wind up.

And at this point, we can see that there's nothing to your argument except pedantry. You use vague blanket statements "all" and "carbs" but link to a specific article about refined carbohydrates only, which really doesn't cover the total scope of "all" carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates are a chemical class. You get carbs when you eat fruits and vegetables. Those are carbs.

People who go vegan have to deal with managing their carb intake all the time, and guess what? It _ain't_ just because of bread, pasta, rice, whole grain, flour and sugar. The sources of protein for a vegan diet often bring carbs along for the ride. Legumes bring carbs to the table. Quinoa is really popular, but includes a carbohydrate load, even though it's a good source of essential amino acids.

If carbohydrates _aren't_ an essential aspect of metabolism, then can you explain the role of glycolysis as an input to the Krebs cycle? Need a link for that?

[https://google.com/search?q=glycolysis+krebs+cycle](https://google.com/search?q=glycolysis+krebs+cycle)

Have fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >How nutrition lost out to physical activity

This is spot on. The thing is that to lose weight one just needs to eat less. That's it. Although, for an average person it's very hard to eat less while keeping consuming lots of sugary foods because sugar makes you hungry. But once you remove added sugar from your diet eating less stops being a problem.

The problem is that the corporate world doesn't want you to eat less, because they can't make money off you if you just eat less. They want you to keep buying sugary stuff and exercise, because when you're trying to fight obesity with exercise you need to buy running shoes, sportswear, gym bag, fitness tracker, apps for fitness tracker, gym membership, bicycle, and so on. It's a huge huge business. That's why you keep seeing ads for all those kinds of things (and sugary foods too). You will never see an ad that would tell you "just eat less" because no corporation would ever pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Obesity is a disease of improper nutrition and nothing else. Physical activity can not fix the problem with food. A country like China could easily control obesity by banning all the companies producing obesity by selling obesity causing food products. In the West this is outright difficult, but it's trivial for a country like China. Ban soft drinks, ban fast food, ban junk food. Obesity solved.

<comment><USER8> There is plenty of Chinese food with lots of sugar in it, not to mention those that are super carb heavy. It isn't just the western versions of Chinese food either, you could avoid processed and fast food and still have a problem.

<comment><USER9> I lived in mainland China for over 4 years. I lost weight switching from a typical American diet to Chinese one. I don't claim to know the cause, but the standard drink with meals was unsweetened tea, not soda. Yes, the meals were carb heavy, but these carbs were primarily vegetables. Rice was always served at the end, only to fill up, if you were still hungry.

From the hundreds of local restaurants to Foxconn's cafeteria, I am sure of a few things. Compared to Americans, they eat a higher percent of vegetables and fat and less meat. For example ordering a pork dish, might actually be chunks of pork fat that Americans would never eat.

As far as sweet foods, I only observed that when I was in Shanghai. Most Chinese do not like main courses to be sweetened.

<comment><USER10> Is the food oily? I am more or less a vegetarian, and have always wondered why Chinese food is seemingly able to hold down obesity as compared to Indian food (I'm Indian) - well, modern Indian food at least. I am not sure whether the traditional Indian food of 70-80 years ago was as oily, fatty and unhealthy as today's fare.

<comment><USER4> Something I've observed in India is that (probably due to industry meddling), there have been campaigns to get people to switch from ghee to vegetable and palm oils, saying that ghee is unhealthy.

At the same time, obesity and diabetes rates have rocketed.

Of course, this is the only cause, but we had similar campaigns in the west against butter and lard, steering people towards vegetable oil.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vivaldi – A Browser for Our Friends - <AUTHOR> https://vivaldi.com/ <comment><USER3> I check in on Vivaldi every few months to see how it's coming along, and there are some things that I like. However, I think they're a bit TOO fixated on Opera as it was 15 years ago.

I keep waiting for bookmark sync, which today is a fundamental browser feature rather than a nice-to-have. But the Vivaldi guys insist on pouring resources into an integrated desktop email client instead, because that was a signature feature of Opera back in the day. However, it's probably no exaggeration to say that most users haven't used a desktop email client in over a decade. So why is such a retro throwback feature prioritized so high?

Another example is right-clicking a link in Vivaldi, to open it in a new tab. Every other major browser opens the link in a background tab, keeping the focus in the tab you're currently on. However, Vivaldi automatically jumps the focus over to that tab right away... because that was default Opera behavior 15 years ago. This is frequently brought up in Vivaldi forums, and the response from the devs is simply to grumble that old-school Opera was best and all other browsers today have bad defaults.

I'm a huge Opera fan, and have been for years. However, the thing is... I just don't WANT a re-implementation of Opera from 15 years ago. I'm sorry, but desktop email is dead for most of us. I'm sorry, but Chrome has acclimated us to some slightly different default behaviors, and at this point those are the defaults that I expect and want other browsers to mirror.

You want to enable a whole new level of customization for power users? That sounds AWESOME! You want to provide some security and an alternative path forward, for Opera fans who worry about that company's ownership changes? Great! But please don't be so beholden to the Opera of 2002 that you don't make an offering well-suited for 2017.

<comment><USER4> Almost everyone I know using email for business uses a desktop client - usually Mac Mail, sometimes thunderbird.

A new client that isn't quite so neglected would be very welcome.

<comment><USER5> Another use case is someone like me. I absolutely love Fastmail's web client, it's better than any other web client I've used including Gmail. However, I also have a few email addresses for domains that I own, and I don't want to deal with clunky forwarding; I prefer to use them as-is. For those it's much, much easier to use a good desktop client rather than set up and maintain Roundcube or even SquirrelMail on my servers.

Windows 10's Mail app is not quite up to the task; it's fine for Outlook.com webmail but I need something much more powerful on Windows without having to buy Outlook proper (on Linux this obviously isn't an issue, there is a wealth of good desktop email clients for X and the console). So far I've been doing well with Thunderbird, but I'm tempted to give Vivaldi a shot since I was always a fan of Opera's email integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using Vivaldi now for over a year (since early beta days), and finding it a great experience.

A couple of things I really like - (1) that the browser chrome changes to suit the colour scheme of the website that you have loaded when flicking through tabs. Makes it really easy to identify what site you are on especially if you have scrolled down past the header. (2) that they have a slider on the bottom toolbar for zooming in/out of websites. For this old guy with failing eyesight, that is a killer feature that I use all the time.

Happy to also see that the number of sites reporting "You are not using an approved browser" has reduced to nearly 0 when browsing via Vivaldi, but that is more a problem for lazy web designers who only create sites specifically for a particular rendering engine, I guess.

EDIT: Interesting Observation - I remember that in the early days, their main selling point was their command line functionality for power users. That was what made me change over back then, although ironically I never ever use their CLI tool set at all these days, and just use the mouse like always.

I note that they have downplayed the CLI functionality on their current website, so perhaps it wasn't such a drawcard for other users either?!?

<comment><USER7> > Makes it really easy to identify what site you are on especially if you have > scrolled down past the header.

You find using browser chrome color is easier than using URL bar for identifying the site?

<comment><USER6> LOL, next you'll be saying that we should replace coloured traffic lights with black and white "STOP" and "GO" signs?

I'd suggest you do a Google search on the human ability to discern colour as an indicator _way_ faster than reading text. Especially if on the peripheral vision outside of direct line of sight. NASA and USAF research papers on layouts of aircraft/spacecraft instrumentation etc. too might be helpful to you.

Real world example - Right now, as I type this in another browser in the foreground, my Vivaldi browser is 80% obscured by this window, but I can tell by the right edge of the window colour that the currently active tab on it is my Google Mail.

<comment><USER8> > I'd suggest you do a Google search

> on the human ability to discern colour

> as an indicator way faster than reading text.

"In psychology, the Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.

...

This is based on the idea that word processing is significantly faster than color processing."

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

<comment><USER9> Interesting, true; but then repeat the experiment with your peripheral vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Glad you like our browser. We are working hard to continue to add really useful features, cool stuff and more flexibility. Our philosophy is that we all deserve a browser that works in the way we want it to. This means we listen to input and gradually add the features and options you want.

Cheers, Jon of Vivaldi

<comment><USER11> Hi Jon!

I know you are a stand-up guy [0]. Have you considered working with the free software community to create a truly free and modern browser?

No-one trusts Chromium since it's filled with Google-specific bits and tweaks, even analytics. Assuming you've trimmed all of that away, releasing your add- ons as free software (e.g. GPL or BSD) would create some real traction around Vivaldi as a browser alternative.

This also avoids the "Opera mistake". If Presto had been open sourced, it would still be alive and kicking today. With Blink things are different, and I don't see how keeping a proprietary user interface is going to sustain a browser company.

Suggestion: make the core browser slim, pluggable and free, and sell extensions and infrastructure parts necessary for sync, updates etc with a GPL and/or proprietary license.

Oh, and [0]: [https://i.imgur.com/UFh2M.png](https://i.imgur.com/UFh2M.png)

<comment><USER12> I knew which picture it was before i even opened it :) the Opera community used to be so amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi As an old Opera user I really want to like Vivaldi, but the weird titlebar without title and especially the non-native menubar really turn me off (in a native menubar under Windows, once you click a menu, you can just move your mouse without clicking to navigate the rest of the menus. In Vivaldi's menubar, you can't, making the menus _way_ clunkier to navigate). For this reason, I actually find the experience of Otter Browser ([http://www.otter- browser.org/](http://www.otter-browser.org/)) to be closer to Opera's than that of Vivaldi: even if Otter is more bare-bones in terms of functionality, it really gets the efficient UX feel better. I encourage old Opera fans to check it out as well.

I hope the Vivaldi team fixes these so I can really like it. Some of my previous turnoffs (like lack of "click tab to minimize") were implemented so I'm hopeful... although not _too_ hopeful because this menu implementation has been there for quite long so they don't seem to take the menubar too seriously.

<comment><USER13> I was asking for a proper native title bar possibly a year ago since I'm using the "classic" Windows theme and that's just ideal. It doesn't take up much space and it shows the whole page title.

[http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png](http://puu.sh/tcYJ7/b7479e05cd.png)

<comment><USER14> Have you seen this setting? Apperance -> Window Appearance -> Use Native Window [https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/d4ew5ptyusm4cjb/Screenshot%202017-01-06%2012.27.41.png?dl=0)

You can also choose between horizontal menu on top, or "Vivaldi Menu" in the top left.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't work properly on Windows, you just just get a blank title bar with only the window controls at right (not even the window icon / menu on the left appears).

Does work correctly on Mac OS though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I switched to Vivaldi as my default browser 6+ months ago after new-Opera became such an overwhelming disappointment I felt I had to abandon what it had become after fifteen or more years of use. Vivaldi _definitely_ has the old Opera spirit, but not the performance. On original Opera I could have hundreds of tabs open, in Vivaldi I can have 60? not such a big deal, right!? well it's partly that, partly just a constant reminder that software has become horribly inefficient even with scads of system resources - Opera always felt extremely small and efficient. Vivaldi feels big and heavy like emacs (that I also love and use) but less performant.

I feel that came off negatively! Vivaldi is a _fantastic_ modern browser.

On Arch: yaourt -S vivaldi-snapshot

<comment><USER17> I fear this is largely due to modern websites. If you used old Opera on modern websites they would be broken (lack of new features) and still pretty slow.

JS and image sizes have gone up exponentially. I remember discussion on Slashdot a decade ago about average page size going above 100KB - now the average is easily into multiple megabytes. It "works fine" in chrome on a macbook pro so who gives fuck, right? We can't go back to an older web - <USER2> can't get off this train, and we can't slow it down, it's inexorably pulled forward by market mechanisms way bigger than we are.

<comment><USER18> And nowadays* Chrome unloads "old" tabs from memory, which must be a frustrating user experience for low memory users, open something in a new tab, try to go to the previous tab, and the browser had to load it again.

* Maybe they've fixed this

Of course it all works on the developer's machine, it has 16GB RAM, full HD screen and a connection straight to the backbone...

<comment><USER19> Well. To be fair the developer is upset that the MacBook pro doesn't come with 32GB RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So what's the business model here? This is a "free" product, so how does Vivaldi intend to ensure its continued existence?

<comment><USER21> I'm wondering this too. Mozilla has tons of sponsorship from Yahoo and others. Google invests in Chrome to give them leverage for their own products. Since Vivaldi is closed source, how do I know they aren't selling my data?

<comment><USER22> Vivaldi is allegedly free software: [https://vivaldi.com/source/](https://vivaldi.com/source/)

<comment><USER21> Looks like you're right. The original Vivaldi code is a BSD-style license, and although I didn't check all the dependencies, it seems to be mostly Chromium + lots of original code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a web developer using chrome and emacs all day, I was very skeptical. Decided to give it a try and looks really good so far. It's got a lot of the good chrome stuff and so far I haven't found absolutely anything I miss.

So far I really like:

\- Ctrl-P-like tab switcher / command thingy

\- fast (but that may be just how different new browsers always feel like at first)

\- the web page size indicator on the address bar

\- tabs can be configured to be wherever the hell i want them

\- the regular, good chrome debugger

\- can run chrome extensions straight from the store

I don't know who the devs are and how long this browser will be around for, but it's seriously well done!

Set as default.

<comment><USER24> Developers of Vivaldi used to work on Opera browser.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for your kind words about Vivaldi.

I was the co-founder of Opera and now co-founder of Vivaldi. A big part of the team is former Opera people. We are based in Norway and Iceland, mostly, with team members in a couple of other locations.

<comment><USER24> Thank you for the Opera, it was my primary browser for a number of years. And good luck to you with your new endeavor, you certainly have some right ideas in Vivaldi :)

<comment><USER10> Thanks. We aim to please. :)

There is a lot more cool stuff in the pipeline. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Vivaldi is frustrating, as it nearly implements all the bits of Opera I use, but there are odd bits where it falls short

The main thing for me is the fact that tab minimisation doesn't work correctly, sometimes tabs you've minimised get selected, sometimes even when there are unminimised tabs. It's just wrong, and the tab handling was one of the main reasons I used Opera

Beyond that there's a lack of a bookmark menu, the fact that toolbars aren't customisable, no click-to-active for plugins and no site preferences, but they're less important things that don't mess up my workflow as much. Also it's rather ugly, but I fear we'll have to wait for several more years before flat design goes out of fashion to fix that.

I really want to get rid of my current Firefox + a load of extensions setup, especially as I haven't a clue if it'll survive Mozilla's next round of extension breaking updates. But Vivaldi just isn't quite there yet. I really want it to be...

<comment><USER13> One of the most frustrating things for me is the lack of Dragonfly...

<comment><USER25> and live editing of html source from cache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A lot more interesting information on the Wikipedia page:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_(web_browser)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivaldi_\(web_browser\))

Looks like it uses Blink engine, first release was 8 months ago. Looks like you can also use Chrome extensions with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was blown away by the customizability, I used Firefox with a split tab extension, yet this has native support.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately you can't resize the split. I almost never want an exact 50-50 split. One webpage always scales better then the other in split mode.

<comment><USER28> You guys need to rotate your screen 90 degrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For context: behind Vivaldi there is part of the original Opera team. Vivaldi indeed really resemble to Opera 12: and that's awesome. But they are using Blink instead of the defunct Presto.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've used Vivaldi as my primary (Chrome as secondary) browser the past 3 months (along using Vivaldi.net as my e-mail address – thank you for offering this, Vivaldi team).

I love the browser so far, and think it deserves many accolades for what it has and is attempting to accomplish. I do run into the occasional issues that remind me this is a newer browser, though. Mostly these are only noticeable because they completely break your concentration from what you were doing.

For instance, if you attempt to bookmark the current page but realize you want to put it in a new folder, then you'll have to break your flow of bookmarking by going to the Bookmarks page, create the folder, then go back to page again to add it to the newly created folder.

Right-clicking on a link and opening in a new tab will immediately take you to that new tab, even if you wanted to save it for after you finished the current page. There may be a chrome setting for this, but a cursory glance at the preferences window didn't show any kind of wording that would indicate "open new tab in background".

The only main gripe I really have is in retrieving saved passwords. Yes, I can put the URL directly into the bar and go there that way, but it's an inconvenience I don't have to deal with in Chrome (or Firefox).

Even with these few issues, Vivaldi has been my favorite browser these past months, and I can't wait to see how it matures.

</comment><comment><USER31> Been using it for 6 months now and I love it. Verticals tabs were literally the only thing keeping me on Firefox.

Love the search bar which splits suggestions into Typed, Bookmarks, History categories.

So many great details and customization features in this browser.

<comment><USER32> It still doesn't nest tabs like Tree-Style tabs addin for FF though right? When they get that I'll switch at least part time, FF for me is getting so laggy (due to inefficient JS on certain websites like twitter) it is extremely painful to use.

EDIT:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style- tab/16](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-tab/16)

One page 4:

[https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style- tab/67](https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/3255/tree-style-tab/67)

"I do know that internally, there is discussion as to various ways TST might be implemented. Nothing has been settled on, but there is discussion."

<comment><USER33> You can stack tabs in Vivaldi. It's pretty similar, good enough for me. One thing I miss from firefox is the tab groups feature though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would switch to this immediately but it still doesn't support any sort of sync. People use browsers on multiple devices these days. Not sure why this isn't a priority for the Vivaldi team?

<comment><USER10> This is a priority for sure. We are getting there.

<comment><USER28> Can I point out that we want to have our cake and eat it too? I really really want password sync, but I also really don't want you to know any of my passwords. This is going to be hard for you to pull off successfully. How are you planning to achieve it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hope they will not repeat fatal error of Opera - closed bug-tracker.

</comment><comment><USER36> Coming from Firefox, it's got a very nice default UI - I love the loading animations and such. It seems easy to customize, though puzzlingly the icons don't seem to be themeable even though colors, address bar appearance, etc are - which is a bummer because the default icons are ugly Windows 8-style/Metro things.

Also, it seems to be implementing its own scrollbars that are stylized differently than _everything else_ on my computer. Firefox also uses my GTK theme for things like checkboxes, etc (right out of the box), which is pretty cool. Vivaldi's doing some cool things, but it's still got a ways to go.

</comment><comment><USER37> How is Vivaldi's power consumption and memory footprint? Those were the biggest motivators to switch from Chrome to Safari on macOS for most browsing (I still use Chrome for some front-end dev stuff). I can browse the web forever with Safari on my 2012 MacBook Air, Chrome not so much (haven't tried FF as a daily driver in ages so would love to hear about it too).

Off-topic aside: is power consumption even a concern for engineers these days? Looking at what's possible with technologies that are somewhat fringe, it's hard not to think about how much power we're gobbling up that we really don't need.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing i like about Vivaldi is that i can set a whole UI scaling factor. Because this makes it easy to adapt for touch input (just crank the factor up until the elements are of a practical size).

Just wish it didn't have frequent issues with touch screens on my Windows tablet, leading to it not responding to any input until i switch to different window and back.

Also, it never seems able to bring up the on-screen keyboard when tapping input areas on sites. But it comes up (unless the previously mentioned unresponsiveness kicks in) when tapping the url field.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'd become your friend if your browser became open source.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just installed it. Reading this on Vivaldi. Looks great so far.

</comment><comment><USER41> Just gonna leave this here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11830326)

</comment><comment><USER42> There are a ton of great ideas in Vivaldi's user interface. And it's built on Chrome, so you still get all the standards and extension compatibility. They regularly add clever new features that materially improve tab management and navigation. I'm looking forward to making it my default browser at some point in the future when they add sync for bookmarks etc.

</comment><comment><USER43> No source, no deal.

<comment><USER44> There's this: [https://vivaldi.com/source/](https://vivaldi.com/source/) (don't know what's inside)

<comment><USER45> AFAIK, this is mostly Chromium and their patches. The interface itself (that is mostly build in something similar to Electron, i.e. JavaScript, CSS and HTML) is completely closed source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Until proper mobile sync comes about for passwords and bookmarks I'm going to have to stick to Safari, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER47> I could've given it a try if it was opensource. But because it's closed I immediately classify it as vaporware, and as the browser is one of the two centers of my daily computing (the other being emacs), I won't invest in vaporware. I believe that opensourcing is the best choice of the company behind this.

<comment><USER48> The source is available at [https://vivaldi.com/source/?lang=en_US](https://vivaldi.com/source/?lang=en_US)

<comment><USER47> What about the licence? There are five-six xz'ed tarballs there, each ~600 MBs.

<comment><USER25> Copyright 2017 Vivaldi Technologies AS. All rights reserved.

1\. This End User License Agreement ("EULA") governs your use ("You") of the browser software in executable form ("Software") and any ancillary services ("Services") provided to You by Vivaldi Technology AS ("Vivaldi") to the exclusion of all other terms and conditions. Source code used in the Software, under open source license agreements, can be obtained at [https://vivaldi.com/source](https://vivaldi.com/source).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Been using Vivaldi for probably a year, but I am now looking for a new browser. Too many media/crash issues have started popping up with running the browser without hardware acceleration enabled. And the options that let me disable it in the first place have been removed.

I guess all I really want is chrome without the tracking.

<comment><USER25> What you want is iron, which was available since pretty much the early day of chrome.

here: [https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php) and this: [https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iro...](https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php)

You could also have a look at epic over there: [https://www.epicbrowser.com/](https://www.epicbrowser.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> First time I heard or used Vivaldi; the whole 2-panels in 1 browser chrome side by side looked interesting, but using it, docking/undocking tabs and resizeing the area's just feels very slow, especially when you're used to how snappy Google Chrome feels. Too bad because I want to like this :)

<comment><USER51> This is a sad problem that has come with developers using Javascript for everything. Development might be faster, but the end product is simply slow even on high-end machines.

Same thing happens with Visual Studio Code, Brackets and Atom when compared to Sublime Text, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I really like Vivaldi, but I cannot use it as my main browser because I really miss browser synchronization. With Chrome, I have everything synchronized, so setting up my browser environment I'm used to on new computer takes just few clicks. I hope Vivaldi will have this too soon.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is it possible to arrange the tabs in the side bar in a hierarchical list view? It seems it is possible to make stacks of tabs, but the individual tabs in the hover menu are not very accessible IMHO ("out of sight, out of mind"). Otherwise this browser looks really nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Vivaldi uses chrome extensions, if there's one that would provide that, it looks like it can be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Waits patiently for the mail client.

</comment><comment><USER55> One thing that always turns me off is the lack of proper popup support (last I checked).

Some addons I like don't like that and that one website I need for studying doesn't like it any more either.

But otherwise it's a solid browser.

</comment><comment><USER56> Is it bad to say at this point I've spent so much time with Chrome that I am not interested in switching? Things work well for me.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've decided to roll out and use my own browser;

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" \--Isaac Newton

</comment><comment><USER58> My only concern is that it does not have settings / history sync yet.

<comment><USER6> But that will mean that you probably have to set up an account with Vivaldi.com, similar to how you have to do it on Google.com for Chrome.

Personally, I like not having to remember yet another set of login credentials for every app I use. Perhaps if they supported syncing of browser setups via DropBox, G-Drive etc. then it may be a way to (a) backup your browser settings in one place and (b) share it among your devices or even among work colleagues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> No FreeBSD support. No go.

</comment><comment><USER60> aren't we kinda passed the days of closed source browsers?

<comment><USER61> Safari and Edge are closed-source, Google Chrome (not Chromium) is too, in some way.

<comment><USER25> I wonder in which way chrome is not proprietary. AFAIK it is 100% proprietary freeware, at least this my understanding of the legal terms in the ToS / EULA: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/eula_t...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/eula_text.html)

<comment><USER61> In the way that you can build a very similar version of it (Chromium) from source code released under OSS licenses. You can't do that with Edge, Safari or Vivaldi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Vivaldi is awesome! Thank you Vivaldi team!

</comment><comment><USER63> Uh oh. They made the browser mistake.

<comment><USER64> Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER65> They made the browser mistake, which part do you need elaborated?

<comment><USER66> This is part of the team behind Opera. Sounds like they have the chops</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Recommend a company for an animated company overview video - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering if anyone could recommend a small studio that does quality video work for a animated video for our company. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Hi there - I'll throw our name into the hat :)

<http://whatdoesyourstartupdo.com></comment>


Making a Japanese style garden table - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjYO7u9Jeh4 <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Free Startup Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/a/thekronos.com/document/d/1q-gn4Vs50BfZ_OKeES38JNlfHdkyOtAgITE3sDdzXHg/edit <comment><USER2> I hate to hijack this submission, but not so long ago I tried submitting some free startup ideas of my own on Github here: [https://github.com/Vheissu/Free- Ideas](https://github.com/Vheissu/Free-Ideas) — because I'm not a Hacker News power-user and don't live in a popular time zone (I'm from Aus) it was largely ignored.

Ideas are very much in the execution, but I think you need a good idea to execute upon in the first place and this Google Doc and the likes of my repository of ideas are perfect ways to find an idea or perhaps add to an existing idea.

<comment><USER3> Hey I posted a comment below...but I was just wondering if you could add these ideas to the following site.

It would make it easier than having to go to a github page or read a google doc.

[http://ideas.ozonebit.com/](http://ideas.ozonebit.com/)

<comment><USER4> I was thinking of setting up a site similar to yours. I even got a domain and set up a launchrock page [1].

But after a couple of months (still haven't started it), I'm finding that putting up a google doc/hackpad/blog post is a lot less friction. The nice thing about having a centralized place like yours (and the one I intended to build), is that the ideas wouldn't be fragmented into different sites/docs.

If anyone's interested in using the domain (unused.me) for an idea site, let me know, I'd gladly give it up :)

[1] [http://signup.unused.me/](http://signup.unused.me/)

<comment><USER3> Oh wow! This is awesome! Yours looks so much better. I went with the simplicity approach. I had the same belief, having them in one place allows people to go to ONE hub of ideas.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think build a business is as easy as choose from a list.

You sure can implement every problem reported in that list but if you don't know/have the problem in first person, how good can your solution be?

<comment><USER6> I heard about a small business that makes bingo cards for non-technical (putting it mildly in some cases) mostly US-based elementary school teachers, created by some guy in Japan.

I don't think that having the problem yourself is necessarily good. I think it's better in many cases to go solve a problem for "real people" \- those that are currently using, say, an Excel sheet in place of what your solution offers, or something like that.

<comment><USER7> The replies to this post show there is no market for humor on HN, even if some seem to lack that exact thing :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh there is a market just a small one. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 83 intrigues me.

Even with the move by many sites of having to pay to message, there is still a huge problem with the experience for women dating online. Very few of my female friends even want to try it, given the horror stories they've gotten from others. A Sadie Hawkins approach would be interesting.

And yeah fellas, I know it's not all of us that send unbidden wang pics or do those overly aggressive creepy PMs and then flip out when someone has the audacity to exercise their free will and say no. But there's enough that do that it poisons the whole experience. And if you think the problem is exaggerated, read any of the numerous articles done by guys who also doubted how bad it was who posed as women on dating sites - it's revolting.

<comment><USER9> 83 already exists in France. It's called "Adopte un mec" (translation: adopt a guy) and it's very successful ([http://www.adopteunmec.com](http://www.adopteunmec.com)). It ysed to target a yound adult crowd with some funky design but the UX and design god much better over the years so they may be moving up.

<comment><USER10> I used to work with an office full of females, and a French woman was showing this site to the others. They were reading it and laughing about it, and I remember feeling uncomfortable then. I was imagining how a woman would feel if a room full of men went onto a website and laughed about picking out their ideal woman. A bit of a double standard because it's funny if girls are doing it, but if guys did that it would be sexual harassment. But I'm sure it was all in good fun and it was done in a classier way than men would have done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At the risk of sounding negative, I thought the majority of these ideas were absolutely awful. Even if one of these did inspire someone to put the work in, I doubt it would get them very far.

<comment><USER12> You get what you pay for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Precisely, way to complain about free stuff geez, so you want me to execute them, pivot and mail the money? :-)

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a great business to me, better than I've managed to do by myself. Sign me up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that one will go bankrupt and we'll have to pivot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Spotted: Find me in every available internet picture. Ohh look a wedding in Munich, there's me walking past.

<comment><USER15> I'd pay some good money for this service!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If only non-technical people cold emailing programmers suggesting 50-50 cofounder partnerships knew such a list existed.

Precious ideas! Not one, but MANY!

<comment><USER17> If only programmers beating their heads against a brick wall wondering why their new "startup" isn't getting any traction knew the phrase "domain expertise" and the word "sales".

<comment><USER18> Most of the nontechnical people you meet who will claim domain expertise are full of shit. The ones with real domain expertise are still technical, but of a different type. For example, in my field, domain experts know programming, but they do it with AMPL, AIMMS, BUGS, Stan, etc. The ones who run around claiming domain expertise, however, are mostly commodities: MBAs that can only accomplish something by hiring someone to do it for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a very well funded company in Vancouver (yes, really) that's working on #38 a crunchbase for charities. So far they've linked up all Canadian charities to their platform (US next) and are themselves a registered charity.

What's unique is that you can 'donate' to them anytime, get a tax receipt, & decide which charity to give to at a later date.

They're called Chimp Fund (Chimp.net) - I've met the founders and contracted for them before.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting. There's also apparently a company going public that's also, tho the doc is a bit crazy right now maybe once it cools down you can see that comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Free as in sofa. (No cost, similar value)

</comment><comment><USER21> This post reminds me that I need to have more diversity in my life and reading material. All of these ideas struck me as good, and then I realized they are all basically targeted at people like me because that's the type of people who created this list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, we're just regular people. My small biz is making a few k right now and I'm looking into testing new ideas this week for something bigger. If we're similar lets connect: [https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan](https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The dating website where only women can start a conversation has been tried with success (AdopteUnMec in France).

I like the MTurk for cryptocurrency idea.

<comment><USER23> I have a niche dating site that has had about 9 girls for every guy consistently for years. I thought the problem would logically take care of itself, but here is a real counterexample. As a guy with limited ladies-man skills, it still boggles my mind to this day.

<comment><USER24> It would be much easier to believe you if you provided a link. Might also help to solve your ratio problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This might work better as a subreddit than a Google doc.

<comment><USER26> [http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/](http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find lists like this to be rather naive. A lot of people think that businesses are all about: good idea + great execution. Wrong! A business is about: making money. Plain and simple. You don't need a fancy idea and the latest execution 'methods' (e.g. agile, lean, etc.) to make money.

You need a market, hard work, smart decisions, and a bit of luck. There is way too much conversation conflating the concepts of innovation and business. I would say that in the case of innovation it IS about: good(novel) idea + great execution.

I imagine many startups feel that they MUST innovate to be a 'worthy' company. But, you really don't. To be a company you just have to make money. You do whatever is necessary to do just that. Nokia sold rubber tires FFS [0]

[0] [http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/about-us/the- nokia-s...](http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/about-us/the-nokia-story/)

<comment><USER28> I think you misunderstand. This isn't "just do this and you'll be rich". It's obvious that it isn't because then why would they give out the ideas? This document exists precisely _because_ ideas are cheap.

Since ideas are easy and execution is hard, it makes no sense to hoard ideas.

The things that you say are necessary and which are in your control (seeing if you have a market, working hard, making smart decisions) are collectively what people call execution.

<comment><USER27> The title of the article is: Free STARTUP (Business) Ideas. NOT: Free Product Ideas.

This concept still doesn't seem to phase people. You don't need novel ideas to start a business. That's why I am trying to make it clear that it is incorrect to conflate a startup (business) with some sort of invention (like the car or lightbulb). The two are non-equivalent. Although, one can lead to the other.

This reduction of business to: idea + execution is not doing anyone any good.

>seeing if you have a market, working hard, making smart decisions) are collectively what people call execution

This thinking can also be misleading as business ideas can actually be a sub- component of smart decisions.

>ideas are easy and execution is hard

This is also an over-simplification that will do no one any good. And it seems to be pervasive throughout the 'startup community'. Google started on a research paper. Research papers are NOT easy. So, no, ideas are not always easy.

Of course, you might argue that the research paper was part of the 'execution' in which case you would be arguing my previous point: innovation is what has the idea + execution phase. The end result of innovation is usually an invention (whether it be fractional reserve banking or microprocessors).

The research paper was not a business and not part of a business. The invention was eventually used to power a business. The same with the invention of the lightbulb.

Anyways, I just wish people would stop oversimplifying things. It really does no good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you have too much time on your hands...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> FWIW - I do a version of the Idea Validator mentioned there at services.withstartups.com

I think the validation methods mentioned are pretty valid. The one major problem I have found is that there is a very small/distinct set of people who even understand what the validation is all about, and get the idea of developing a quick MVP. And these people are usually savvy/skilled enough to do a quick validation themselves. The opposite end of the spectrum are people who cannot do this, but then they also do not understand that this is not a quick & cheap website making service.

Still, you get to talk to a lot of people. So if you like to bounce ideas (I do), it is an interesting business.

<comment><USER30> >I do a version of the Idea Validator... >I _think_ the validation methods mentioned are pretty valid

Emphasis added :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Problem: people think ideas are really valuable. > Solution: a marketplace > to sell IP

Haha. If only there was a place where nobody would buy their ideas, they'd realize how worthless they are.

<comment><USER32> Most people who are delusional about the value of their ideas would refuse to put it up on such a website / share it with anybody unless the other person signed a non disclosure agreement.

I wonder if there's some way to capitalize on that...

<comment><USER33> We could have a site-wide NDA

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I personally research Twitter and message boards the way you described it for "blogdia". But I don't think there would be people / wantrepreneurs willing to pay for such an app.

Instead, why not doing a private / paid newsletter for that? Or a site where wantrepreneurs can buy your market research about a specific idea. And only a limited number of each idea can be sold in order to increase the perceived value of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I left me twitter at the beginning of the doc feel free to reach out and we can talk it through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wow this is great... Now all that remains to do is years of hard graft, hustling and a massive truck of luck and you might be successful! Amazing!

</comment><comment><USER36> OMG please improve typograpy. One font size/weight for introduction, one for list and another for your service promotion.

</comment><comment><USER37> Someone made this spreadsheet back in the day (I don't know when I got it, but it's in my google drive)

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag- R_ZlGO21NdE9...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag- R_ZlGO21NdE9HSWRkbjNyUGRxS2JIV3NxYVdiaXc&usp=drive_web#gid=2)

</comment><comment><USER38> "There are tons of contracting jobs that are easy to do, but people think only 'real programmers' can solve valuable problems."

I see more the opposite - non-programmers attempting to solve problems (easy or hard) and making a huge mess of things. The video series might help people avoid these problems.

<comment><USER33> That too! One of the most common contracting jobs is to fix somsone's mess.

Maybe the video series will be: Top 10 Code Fails and How to Fix them

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a quick website to add the ideas and vote on them. Check it out!

We can add all the ideas in this post and then the community can upvote / downvote the most popular ones.

[http://ideas.ozonebit.com/](http://ideas.ozonebit.com/)

<comment><USER39> Why can I vote multiple times on the same idea as a single user? I just gave 5 votes to the top one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> " Video Only Job Board "

Have seen this attempted before, but the issues about potential discrimination always crops up. Hard to say you didn't pass over someone because of their appearance when the entire process is video-based.

<comment><USER31> I agree. In fact, I think the opposite is quite interesting: a jobs board where applications are sanitized of race, gender and age information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thanks for compiling these ideas @vladmk. However, I wonder if there's a web application that functions similarly (i.e. provide startup ideas and enable the users to vote for the most popular ones).

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be cool build. :-) My pleasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mirrored it in HackPad :)

[https://freestartupideas.hackpad.com/Free-Startup-Ideas- Oy39...](https://freestartupideas.hackpad.com/Free-Startup-Ideas-Oy39lrxvXmM)

</comment><comment><USER42> "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration"

The list takes care of 1% part. Perspiration is fueled by passion. As long as one can strike the right mix, why not.

<comment><USER43> If Edison spent more time thinking, he wouldn't have to perspire as much. (Paraphrasing Tesla[0])

[0] [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010603-if-he-thomas- edison-...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1010603-if-he-thomas-edison-had-a- needle-to-find-in)

<comment><USER42> Touché

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Lessons learned and takeaways from this experience:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7454441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7454441)

</comment><comment><USER44> [http://www.googlesciencefair.com/springboard/en/](http://www.googlesciencefair.com/springboard/en/)

</comment><comment><USER45> Some ideas on firespotting are good candidates. But of late there are more completed products than ideas there.

</comment><comment><USER46> Good startup ideas are surprisingly cheap, execution is where fortunes are made.

</comment><comment><USER47> Please let's not have another ideas versus execution debate, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER48> Wow, this document totally overtaxes my perception ability.

</comment><comment><USER49> You get for what you pay for here...

</comment><comment><USER50> free startup vomit

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) pivot. I wanna see your golden patented idea ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This whole thing is an early April Fools' right?

"44 Trademark exchange I like that we build lots of IP Problem: people think ideas are really valuable. Solution: a marketplace to sell IP"

<comment><AUTHOR> your life is an early April fools :P couldn't resist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> To quote John Gruber, "Ideas are worthless". It's the implentation that matters. So the idea about an idea generating website isn't all that good. :P

</comment><comment><USER53> Heh, had this idea some while ago. Anyway i can contribute? I got a bunch of great startupideas but i'm busy with other stuff and i don't mind sharing em. Someone register startupleech

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, just give me your email address here on or on twitter or request it on the doc if it ever settles down. [https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan](https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan)</comment></comment>


How to export Django data faster than ever before - <AUTHOR> https://www.californiacivicdata.org/2017/09/05/django-postgres-copy-2/ <comment><USER2> This is cool. Is there a way to automatically sanitize for CSV Injection vulnerabilities? (I.e. stripping out Excel macros.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't considered that. It only accepts CSVs, not Excel files, right now. If you can provide an example of a dangerous file we can try testing against it.

<comment><USER2> I meant in terms of what it's outputting from the models, not what it's accepting as input. Since most apps accepts accept input from users via API endpoints or forms, sanitizing the output strikes me as more important than sanitizing the input, although ideally both should happen.

I don't have any good example data, but this is what I'm talking about:

[https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/issues/3466](https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/issues/3466)

A lot of folks don't care about this if they are making libraries for users, since it's really an issue with Excel, but if people within your company are the ones who are going to be potentially getting pwned then it makes less sense to me to just blame MS or whatever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. This is something I was unaware of.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you improve online education? - <AUTHOR> My daughter did zoom classes for the last part of the year.  It was less than ideal.   She also used an several online resources.  Nothing really seemed amazing for online education for kids.
How would you improve the online aspect of education for kids?
What big idea would change everything? <comment><USER2> I'm excited about AR and to a lesser extent VR. I expect those to be transformative.</comment>


Show HN: Angular 2 HN – A progressive Hacker News client that works offline - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hdjirdeh/angular2-hn <comment><USER2> Is there a hacker news client which focuses more on typography. I use official hacker news site on Web. On a Retina Mac book Pro with 13-inch screen. I find the fonts too small. Also, one major issue is the line height. Even with browser zomming, the text lines seem to be too close together.

I wonder if other hacker news members also find this problematic.

<comment><USER3> Did you try this one: [https://react-hn.appspot.com/](https://react- hn.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for Sharing. Much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, I was just getting started with Angular 2 and Typescript (coming from Angular 1) and I think your example is just the perfect way to understand how an app is to be made with it :)

How is angular-cli different from angular's quick start or a seed project setup ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

The CLI is just a command line interface that makes scaffolding and generating a project a lot easier. Adding new components, routes, services, etc... can be done with simple commands. Angular seed gives you a skeleton that you can start your app with, and the quick start provides a super barebones starting point with just a single AppComponent if I'm not mistaken.

I personally enjoy using the CLI and haven't tried the seed myself. If you're interested in how I set up this app, I wrote a blog post ([http://houssein.me/angular2-hacker-news](http://houssein.me/angular2-hacker- news)) detailing each and every step using the CLI so I hope it helps :) (this was done a few months ago so the progressive elements such as the Service Worker and manifest isn't included)

<comment><USER5> Not sure if you've used this but it sounds like Angular CLI is very similar to Yeoman in terms of guided app generation.

That blog post is very good BTW. I like how it goes through all of the intermediate steps that any developer would do to make a PoC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've only briefly tried Yeoman quite some time ago, but they are quite similar in terms of generating scaffolds.

And thank you, I appreciate it! I tried my best to flush out every single step I had to go through while building the app so I'm glad you liked it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's annoying how it scrolls to the top of the page when when you go back from article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this, I was actually thinking about this when I was playing around with the app on mobile today. Might have to limit the scroll to top only when the user is navigating between pages and not when the user goes back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is well done, but it proves to me that we are not there yet with javascript really replacing mobile apps, even on a such a simple app:

When you click on a news and then you go back to the ng2 app it takes more than a second to load back the js code when compared to any native HN app.

This is a big limitation for a news reader: of course the javascript app cannot stay in memory when you leave the page and then come back to it.

<comment><USER8> That sounds more like a UX flaw in the app than something wrong with JS. Why would a newsreader close itself when you actually read the news? It makes more sense to open articles in a new tab (or whatever your specific device does), and leave the reader open, avoiding this problem. That is a fairly universal mechanism anymore when working from a page/app acting as a content hub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really cool. Love angular-cli so far. Would like to see the styling from [https://vue-hn.now.sh/top](https://vue-hn.now.sh/top) used as I think the animations are challenging to replicate in angular 2.

<comment><USER10> Personally, I find the styling of the OP's site much better than that of Vue- HN, largely because of the higher contrast (and less over-emphasized vote counts).

Might be just me, though, as I still find the vanilla HN site the best looking of all, not to mention it runs with no JS enabled, no cross site stuff, etc., and takes very little resources - the best kind of web design, in my humble opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks good !

btw I am trying to learn service workers and wanted to check how you have implemented the offline support, but when I checked

[https://github.com/hdjirdeh/angular2-hn/blob/master/src/serv...](https://github.com/hdjirdeh/angular2-hn/blob/master/src/service- worker.js) it's empty .. am I missing something ?

<comment><USER12> It's using a library to generate one on the fly: [https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw- precache](https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw-precache)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Firstly, I love your app.

This is kind of a nitpick, but on the desktop version, hovering over the menu options "new, show, ask, and jobs" makes the text bold and pushes the other text aside. It's a little weird. Perhaps work with a fixed width for each menu item so it doesn't push the other items.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, that is kind of weird. Will fix it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug. I built a native Mac Hacker News client. Mackernews. [http://mackernews.com](http://mackernews.com) you can login vote, comment, post, upvote in a native interface. It tries to render a reable web version of the article when possible :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, there a bunch of clients available but not too many that let you login and comment/upvote/etc. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice work. Is the ng2 download still clocking in at ~750 KB webpacked? Restricted to mobile so no webdev tools

<comment><USER16> I am leading an ng2 project at work and with webpack 2 + AOT compilation, we have our app bundled in ~450 KB gzipped & minified, including polyfills (core- js, web animations, viewport buggyfill), Font Awesome (to eventually be stripped out for an svg sprite map - this takes up ~110 KB of the bundle), dependencies (socket.io, Wavesurfer, rxjs, ng2, ng-bootstrap, @ngrx/store, filepicker.js), and our application code.

We definitely could do better, but we are working on a tricky project for the timeline & resources (a course management app for our LMS - features drag and drop slide rearrangement, audio recording & playback, and video playback).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Working offline is cool but the app feels noticably slower than the plain html version for navigating between comments and main pages. Tested on Firefox and Chrome (Android)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I still think there's room for improvement, and I'll be looking into different ways to make it faster (server side rendering being one of them)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Progressive" HN client just ships JS without any server rendering..HN is exactly the kind of application that you would expect to work without any JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's definitely the next thing I need to think about. I agree, this is something that needs to work with JS disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any client that:

\- Has all features (up/down voting)

\- Has >= performance (apparently this one doesn't)

\- Has good large font support</comment>


Creator of Hotmail plans to found new Indian city - <AUTHOR> http://www.nanocity.in/

<comment><USER2> Well I guess he beat PG to founding a town[1]. It certainly makes sense to do it in India where his money will go so much further than in the US. What's crazy is that he's trying to re-create Silicon Valley. If that's a goal it seems like he could do a better job by just investing all that money into a bunch of new startups.

_"We have three major goals for the Nano City: To re-create the Silicon Valley, create state-of-the-art infrastructure, and do all this in a fashion that is self-sustainable and exhausts natural resources to the bare minimum,"_ said Bhatia[2].

1\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006>

2\. <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/263937.cms>

<comment><USER3> Hmm. I would have started smaller. I doubt Sabeer has enough to pay for all this himself. That means he's going to be at the mercy of a bunch of investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He needs to get his website redesigned first... frames inside the menu?</comment>


Using X-Rays for better bandwidth in your data centers - <AUTHOR>

The bandwidth increase is really promising. The only problem with X-Rays is that exposure to them is fatal.<p>http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~gmporter/papers/porter-xray-tinytocs13.pdf <comment><USER2> It seems like the propagation issue is significant. What about radiation effects in semiconductors they will cause? What about using other modulation like QAM or OFDM at 60 GHz? What about advances in fiber?

</comment><comment><USER3> "NASA has recently demonstrated an X-Ray data modulator [3], although at less than 1 Mbps. Further engineering may close this gap."</comment>