"I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/nomedabarbarian/status/1232922661740613634 <comment><USER3> When people ask me why I moved back to Canada from the USA, knowing I'd be paid less and have higher taxes, I often have a hard time articulating what the difference is between the two countries. Why I prefer to live here.

This thread sums it up nicely.

No matter how down-on-my-luck I get back in Canada, I will always have a safety net. I can always walk into a hospital and be treated. I can take time off when I'm sick. I get time off if I have a kid. It's the _law_ here and not just best effort by employers. It's for everyone and not just the rich.

<comment><USER4> Is it is big thing in America now to claim we don't have things we do like time off when we are sick or hospitals to treat us? What on earth is this post about??

<comment><USER5> Looks like around 40% of the US work force has no paid sick leave:

[https://www.americanprogress.org/wp- content/uploads/issues/2...](https://www.americanprogress.org/wp- content/uploads/issues/2012/08/pdf/paidsickdays_factsheet.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Damn, that's hard. In Germany we have six weeks per illness. Meaning you get up to six weeks for your broken leg, another six for arm and so on. Insurance to cover up to a year isn't to expensive neither if you start early. Sounds like paradise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the big reason I think we need to figure out as a society how to make it possible for everyone to keep a roof over their head and food on their plates even if they don't work at all.

The question of whether lazy people will take advantage of the system is not a life-or-death question. The life-or-death question is whether highly motivated and desperate people will take risks they shouldn't because we make them take those risks.

<comment><USER8> I am a highly motivated person, yet if I could keep my home and health without working I would stop working day 1. I would target my motivation at things I personally care about that don't help the economy in the least. My art, woodworking, finishing my stack of books. I am certainly not alone.

This is why I think there needs to be some level of threat of destitution to keep society functional. Without it, this all falls apart.

<comment><USER7> What sort of things would you target your motivation towards? Would they be valuable for humanity? Is "the economy" really the right barometer? (edit: I see you added this - I think those are valuable for humanity! I wish you could spend your time on art and woodworking!)

Personally, I spend a lot of my time keeping a hedge fund's computers working, because they pay me well for it (and I want to not only avoid destitution now, I want savings to avoid destitution in the future). I spend about zero time on any of my open-source projects, which would be more valuable for humanity as a whole, but I can't figure out how to get paid the same amount (or really anything) working on them. And I know my projects are valuable to the economy too - I arrived at this job to find that another team was doing a big migration onto a project I maintain (and haven't had much time for). I didn't know this in advance, and they didn't know I was joining their company.

Besides - it's okay if many people lose their motivation to work, as long as _enough_ people still work from intrinsic motivation. And you'd still have the motivation of needing to earn money for luxuries. Once you finish your stack of books, the survival stipend wouldn't cover buying any more books.

<comment><USER9> You are payed well to do X. You can't get anyone to pay you to do Y. Yet you believe that Y is more valuable to society than X. Why?

Isn't society's willingness to pay you for something a decent signal that society values it?

<comment><USER7> No, because as I just demonstrated, they use my open-source work - <USER2> just has no mechanism to monetize it.

It is possible that I could charge support contracts for the software now - but it's just about done, and it's pretty well documented, and if anything I'd have _less_ incentive to write public docs. And I have no mechanism to get people to fund the next thing I want to work on and think is a good idea. (Well, I could continue working at a high-paying job for a few years and then quit, of course... but the logical conclusion of that loophole is that nobody should be paid enough that they can afford to quit, else they'd be able to ignore the market, right?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I vouched for this post, as it's something that people need to be more aware of. While many people here can remote into their tech job, there are many people who simply do not have such privilege, and those are often the people who make your food and drinks. I too have mostly worked food service jobs, out of a job and looking for one now, and as soon as coronavirus hit the news, I knew that I would be eating out a lot less now because what the Twitter posts describe are completely accurate from my experience. I lived it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for vouching :)

not sure what happened here. I stepped away and this blew up, so I was also unable to change the title into something better. no idea though why this gets flagged (several times).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are a lot of regional differences within the US. In Massachusetts, it's a lot better than this:

* MA has 40 hours of mandatory paid sick leave a year

* Assuming that your employer doesn't offer health insurance, if you're a single person making minimum wage in MA, working 40 hours a week, you qualify for ConnectorCare, with $15 co-pays for primary care visits and no deductible. There's a $82/month premium, but you'd also qualify for a $276/month tax credit.

There are still plenty of situations where a person making minimum wage wouldn't be able to afford a doctor's visit. For instance, if you miss paying your premiums your health insurance can be canceled. Or you could be working for an employer that offers health insurance, but with a high deductible. However, the situation here is a lot less bleak than the thread - for many people here working in the fast food industry a doctor's visit and a week's time off are affordable.

<comment><USER12> Sick leave should be unlimited. Have the employee skype a nurse for 10 minutes if you think they are faking it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This title could be better. Maybe "I spent 9 years as a manager at a pizza place... Nobody in the restaurant industry goes to the doctor when they're sick"?

Or just the latter half? Much more informative than the first half.

<comment><USER14> Ditto. [1] HN seems to have a bizarre tolerance for cryptic headlines. (And the low character limit doesn't help.)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519541)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't miss the re-tweet down farther in the thread:

"I'm an epidemiologist. For 5 years I was specifically a flu/respiratory virus epidemiologist. I was asked on multiple occasions what I thought was the most effective thing we could do to improve the severity of flu season.

That's an easy answer. Universal paid sick leave."

[https://twitter.com/Just_Eleanora/status/1233030130345246720](https://twitter.com/Just_Eleanora/status/1233030130345246720)

</comment><comment><USER16> The incentives really are not in place. He's just scratching the surface of the rabbit hole. If quarantines become compulsory, the situation will be _even worse_. Imagine people actively covering up their symptoms and lying to doctors. It would be complete pandemonium.

The title is not great. I would suggest "I spent 9 years at a pizza place, and I'm terrified of COVID-19."

</comment><comment><USER17> It's in the best interest of restaurant owners to keep their customers safe and to monitor employees of sickness. Unfortunately I doubt they have the foresight to do this, because they're probably living on the edge as well.

But one incidence of coronavirus at their restaurant and their traffic will go to 0 immediately. The owner will go bankrupt almost overnight. Word travels extremely fast these days, especially over social media.

For example I just heard that Stanford hospital has a dozen confirmed coronavirus patients there. If a restaurant has a worker diagnosed no one will go there immediately.

A lot of restaurants are going to go bankrupt over the next 2-3 months unfortunately.

<comment><USER16> No, it's in the best interest of restaurant owners that there are no _documented_ incidences of coronavirus at their restaurant.

To spell it out: if a manager knows someone has the virus, they will fire them. Therefore, the infected will try to cover it up. This will be the case even if healthcare is free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the things that will shake up the US elections and put the entire country at risk is the fact that healthcare is so expensive. If you cannot get treated for coronavirus, you can expect the number of cases to spread and skyrocket.

<comment><USER19> I don't want to downplay the financial concerns but in the US we expect every hospital bed to be full by mid May. Many of those beds lack proper isolation for infectious disease, and we'll have run out of proper PPE supplies for healthcare workers, meaning many of those workers will cycle out of commission. Unfortunately every country is in a similar situation. People are going to go without appropriate care regardless of copays. Helping people cover out of pocket expenses is the easy problem to solve.

[https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909?s=2...](https://twitter.com/LizSpecht/status/1236095180459003909?s=20)

<comment><USER16> > Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed > complacency. It's wrong to assuage the public by saying "only 2% will die." > People aren't adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden > wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n

Isn't the best approach then to do nothing? To be blunt here: if what she's saying is true, most of the vulnerable groups are going to die anyway. So why not just ignore it completely, and spend the healthcare resources on other stuff?

I mean, if the choices are:

1\. 2% of the population dies and the healthcare system and economy collapses completely

2\. 2 + ε% of the population dies

Then the second option is arguably preferable.

<comment><USER19> I believe the unspoken plan is to let it happen but try to let it slow roll through the population at a rate I would describe as a controlled disaster. That's why planes are still flying except to the worst spots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> USA taught me how little people can have as basic rights and because they think of "equality" without factoring in financial status; since they think everyone earns what they get in life. Majority of US is religious. So, I can see why people aren't demanding basic necessities for a decent quality of life and when that would make them feel they haven't earned success.

Knowing the forgoing makes me believe something like loss of life from the coronavirus could possibly be what's needed to get people rallying for change. Otherwise the mentality will continue of I will get mine some day and before then I don't want things to change because I'll get rich eventually.

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel that events like this are the "time to pay the piper" moments with what's wrong with American society. But don't expect to see the price paid. I expect to see a bail out in one form or another to kick the can down the road.

It also reminds me that "Canada is like America put through a low pass filter." We have pretty much the same situation, but with milder extremes. When I worked in a kitchen I did see injuries and sickness get handled more properly because a doctors visit is free and employment insurance is a thing, so they still got paid for being off work. But I also saw the same issues with "you don't get paid if you don't show up" so people worked through short term illnesses. I saw someone step in a pot of scalding chicken broth/fat because they were so fatigued and the idiot who placed it on the floor was sick and fatigued and was skipping steps.

To each their own opinion but as I get older (and indeed pay a crap ton more taxes) I'm becoming increasingly convinced that we need more socialism. This twitter thread is a great example of how we can all suffer when the most vulnerable of us suffers. I say socialism because I believe we need a baseline safety net where, "if you're not conributing, at the very least you're not doing harm." I've met a lot of people where I think "honestly I would rather you just stay out of the way." I think that's the hardest part. We have a culture of absolutely despising the idea of free lunches and free loaders.

<comment><USER22> I think America is anything but a society, more a bunch of folks that happen to be sharing the same tract of land, compared to other cultures.

Hyper-individualism has its shortcomings and as you framed it, the piper has come to collect the money and there's been a lot interest owed.

Hope we are wrong but wouldn't hold my breath.

Disclaimer, haven't set foot in the US yet so I'm only extrapolating from what I have been able to observe from far away.

<comment><USER12> Pretty spot on, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How did submitter conclude that "I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place" is a relevant excerpt that could be used as the title?

The thread is about concerns about health care policy and food service labor practices encourage the spread of viruses, if you want a heads-up.

</comment><comment><USER23> After reading this I think I'm going to skip restaurants & fast food for a while

</comment><comment><USER24> I used to love the US and I came out of the 2010s hating it instead. Sigh.

<comment><USER25> It is an insane asylum, but we're not all crazy here. That said, it is crazy- making watching it crumble from the inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You are all complaining about the system in the US but don't realize it is INTENTIONAL. A pure capitalist society doesn't want Sick Poor People who cant work. You are a drain on the wealth generation engine. Old Sick Poor people are even worse. Check out the Stanford Study [https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income- play-r...](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/04/11/geography-income-play-roles- in-life-expectancy-new-stanford-research-shows/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This will boil down to the cost of a human life at the end of the day, not unlike the speed limit debate where we know cars kill a bunch of people every year, and yet people want to get places 5 minutes faster.

Historically, the cost of a human life has mostly been low but was offset by a sense of community. We've gotten rid of community by allowing people to migrate in large numbers. Migrate from state to state, from country to country, from job to job, from marriage to marriage, from casual sex partner to casual sex partner.

All this migration makes it difficult to create lifelong bonds and without those, you really are screwed in the ways the twitter thread describes.

It's uncomfortable and our current political and mass media setup makes it impossible to have long form conversations on these topics - so I just don't know how things can possibly get better for the average citizen. Sad.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, allowing people to migrate from marriage to marriage lets them _create_ lifelong bonds that actually help them when their first partner turns out to be callous and uncaring. And there's nothing forcing people to migrate if they're happy with their current community.

It's true that the old system was better for some people - e.g., callous and uncaring partners got to have someone obligated to keep taking care of them. I suppose it's a tradeoff.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did Favor get my new credit card # - <AUTHOR> So I recently got a new credit card (lost card replacement). I activated it this evening and updated my pay pal and über apps on my phone with it. When I logged into favor, they already had my new card #?!?!?! <comment><USER2> As others have stated, they use Stripe for payment processing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure the exact mechanics behind it, but essentially the banks send out updates to credit cards to processors. Processors like Stripe then automatically update those details within their systems.

[https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-can-i-keep- customer...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-can-i-keep-customer- card-details-up-to-date)

<comment><AUTHOR> huh, not sure i like this, so if i give someone my cared they have my account number forever? while its a pain to re-enter data, it was sort of nice to start with a clean slate...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stripe has a feature that does this</comment>


Peter Thiel says Silicon Valley has 'jumped the shark' - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/peter-thiel-on-silicon-valley-consumer-internet-trump-re-election.html <comment><USER2> Thiel wrote "Zero to One" specifically about his general thoughts on innovation.

For me, it's hard to say, because we can't see what talent is in the farm systems. Also, we often won't see innovation happen in ways we can predict.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Silicon Valley has "jumped the shark" and there won't be many more breakthrough consumer internet companies."

I've come to the same conclusion in the last year.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now Thiel has made his crore, he's too busy protecting the heap like Smaug, to want to risk the heap on new ventures.

</comment><comment><USER5> Peter Thiel should be more careful using that expression, considering his record.</comment>


European Parliament approves continent-wide biometric database - <AUTHOR> https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/04/european-parliament-approves-continent-wide-biometric-database/ <comment><USER2> Couple of comments:

\- Article is from April 2019 and seems to be an attempt to bring it back into social consciousness.

\- As others have commented previously, it does not focus on EU citizens - primarily non-EU citizens visiting the EU.

\- Appears to be very similar to the existing VISA waiver program run by the USA.

Definitely one that should be classified as "proceed with caution" but it's not as outrageous as the headline makes out.

Further reading:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_the_Schengen_Ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_the_Schengen_Area#ETIAS)

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0388_...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0388_EN.html)</comment>


How Important Is Support in a Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hubstaff.com/intercom-badass-support-software/

<comment><USER2> Intercom's pricing is the product's only con.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I have not found the pricing to be too bad at all actually because if you consider what you pay for other email services in addition to everything else it can do, it comes out to be less.</comment></comment>


Data hidden in audio stream - <AUTHOR> http://scott.wolchok.org/ctf2010/t500.html

<comment><USER2> very cool. now to encode, decode :P</comment>


You're a Business, The employed and self-employed - <AUTHOR> http://max-michaels.blogspot.com/2012/05/your-business-employed-and-self.html

<comment><USER2> For me having my own business (self-employed) is a lifestyle choice, not monetary. Most weeks you probably work more hours and you do have more bosses, this is the downside. However, you can take a healthy amount of vacation time to recharge, which most jobs don't allow in the US. Your standard 2-3 weeks just isn't enough to not burn out and lose focus. Of course doing what you love helps too and makes all the long hours worth it.</comment>


Notion – Document Reimagined - <AUTHOR> http://early-access.notion.so <comment><USER3> I know they're slightly different, but this reminds me of Workflowy[1] which pretty much runs my entire life right now (todo, projects, journaling, brainstorming, informal databases, bookmarks). In looking at tools like this, it's hard to know where the line is between simple functions that you then use to create abstract features, and more complicated interfaces that define features explicitly. It's a nuanced thing. With Workflowy, the simple list and tag interface can do much of what Notion does (of course, minus the great design and multimedia support), but you really need a formal workflow and need to stick to it to make it function well. Whereas Notion kind of designs those patterns for you, but at the expense of some interface simplicity. I feel like Workflowy demands more of a unix philosophy to achieve Notions features. You'll need to chain web apps together. For example, you can use hyper links in Workflowy to link to files in dropbox, or host images on some other site and audio/video on another, where Notion puts in all in one spot. Very cool.

I can definitely see this as a great tool in the classroom for creating interactive discussions. Copy a template for each class and you can have everyone collaborate and focus on the discussion, not taking notes (or better still, take notes in the collaborative page itself, things that aren't originally there), and then after you have a record of everything which you can share across all students and with different classes.

[1] [https://workflowy.com/](https://workflowy.com/)

<comment><USER4> Workflowy reminds me a little bit of a desktop app called Zim, although Workflowy and Notion are prettier.

<comment><USER3> I looked at Zim[1] actually once upon a time. I eventually settled on WikidPad[2]. It had enough features to capture my ideas in the ways I wanted, but I really needed multiple device and cloud support. Ideas happen all over, not just at the desk. This was why Workflowy blew my mind when I discovered how to use it to fit my needs.

[1] [http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/) [2] [http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/](http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every note taker I've found gets the building block unit wrong. The building block unit shouldn't be stylized text with media - it should be content that is digested and summarized. Quotes from books. Summarized web pages - <USER2> automatically or through a clean UI experience. Snippets of video. Wikipedia/dictionary snippets.

Stylized text marries content with design. Having the content be rich objects makes your primary work to summarize instead of stylize, which makes much more sense in research driven contexts (which is pretty much everywhere).

<comment><USER6> Ah, cool! Yes, I completely agree. I'm actually working on something a bit like this which puts blocks of content as the building block.

It's ideal in an educational authoring platform - since you can have some people crafting the content and others curating it by linking groups of content together. It's important to cater to both needs, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic onboarding flow! The "wow"-ing feature gifs followed by your interactive tutorial sold me. Also beautiful use of web components.

I'm curious how far you think you can take contenteditable with all its cross- browser quirks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely gorgeous looking, though I suspect I'm not the target audience, and it seems like there is the slight danger of trying to do too much. Maybe I'm just not thinking big enough about what Notion is trying to accomplish/become.

</comment><comment><USER9> PDF support?

It blows my mind how bad PDF support is in all of these notebook/data organizing apps (I'm looking at you OneNote) given how probably the vast majority of non-HTML digital documents are in PDF format.

<comment><USER10> Evernote has very good PDF support but you need a premium subscription to make it actually useful. I clip PDFs to Evernote and annotate them all the time.

<comment><USER11> I've been thinking about this a bit today[1], because I fear that Evernote is dying. I love and pay for Evernote, but they've been stagnant for years now. They're slowly adding features, but absolutely nothing that I care about.

As far as I can tell, there's really no functional equivalent to what Evernote does: a bucket you can throw data into and search for it later. OneNote probably comes closest from a purely note-taking standpoint, but it's missing some of the key features. This makes me a little nervous, as I now realize how reliant I am on a tool that I have very little confidence in.

[1] [https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952](https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952)

<comment><USER12> What features do you find missing in OneNote? Genuinely interested, as I use it intensely but don't use Evernote.

<comment><USER11> It does basic note taking and checklists and things pretty well (better than Evernote in some ways), but a frequent use case is creating a notebook with stuff in it (a mix of clipped web pages, notes, maybe documents), and then sharing it with someone. Also, it needs to be searchable. It's that part that OneNote seems weaker at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also - if anyone wants to use a great window manager, it's also named notion[0] these days.

[0]: [http://notion.sf.net](http://notion.sf.net)

<comment><USER14> Do they have a non-sourceforge link? Sourceforge is blocked at my place of work (probably rightly so)

<comment><USER13> Not that I know of, no. I wish they did move off of sourceforge after the recent shit they pulled.

[https://github.com/raboof/notion](https://github.com/raboof/notion) is probably your best bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a self-hosted option? I take it it's closed source?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a more-or-less similar thing in Open Source? I'm looking for something like this for quite some time, but would need it to be self-hosted, and what would be even better, end-to-end encrypted (e.g. with shared secret).

<comment><USER12> If you just care about functionality, Leo Editor offers similar features, and adds in being scriptable in Python.

If you also care about usability and zero learning curve, I'm afraid I haven't seen anything similar which is open source, after being searching it for years. The closest thing might be one of several content managers/social networks a la MediaGoblin or Diaspora, or something more flexible you'll need to build your own workflow on some open wiki platform like Twiki or Zwiki.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the Mother All Demos... Congrats to the team, this is amazingly done!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know if there is a JS editor that acts similar to how notion works? I've seen a similar pattern with readme.io, and would love to be able to use it for internal tools.

<comment><USER6> The closest is ckeditor, I think. But that's still a long shot away.

Notion is actually really well constructed (as somebody who's been in the space building tools kinda like it for a while, it's quite impressive). But I agree, the space needs an open source notion...

<comment><USER19> Seen ProseMirror? [http://prosemirror.net/index.html](http://prosemirror.net/index.html)

<comment><USER12> Yes, but it's currently just a rich text editor, it lacks the outlining capabilities (i.e. creating separate hierarchical pages, and tagging). These should be relatively easy to add, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks nice, but so far there's limited platform support:

>Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

>Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

>[https://www.notion.so/tutorial](https://www.notion.so/tutorial)

I'll try it again once Android support is in.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not kidding, this is one of the best things I've seen lately. I basically write for a living and this looks like a real gamechanger.

If you can keep up this quality and fulfill all the promises, I'll be willing to pay a good deal of money for it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I just got the 'unsupported browser' notice on Chromium. Surely it should work the same here as it does on Chrome?

Gorgeous looking product. Site runs a little slow on my older machine but I suppose that's to be expected with the fancy GIFs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks really cool - love the inset video - but I'm struggling to imagine what I'd actually use it for.

Site doesn't seem to say how saving/exporting works - anyone know?

<comment><USER24> I registered, you can currently only export as HTML.

<comment><USER23> That's pretty good though! I worried it might either save something proprietary, lossy conversion (e.g. markdown), or irrecoverable (e.g. PDF) only.

(Of course, you could always use browser-save HTML, but you'd have to manually strip anything like the video)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Make this able to be self hosted, whip up a price plan for enterprise and add a half-decent API then you've got yourself a lot of customers. Awesome looking product

</comment><comment><USER24> This is one of the most gorgeous things I've seen in a while. I'm a little saddened that the homepage doesn't work on Firefox yet.

<comment><USER26> What's broken? I see it just fine in FF40

<comment><USER27> (With Firefox 40.0.3) Support for your browser is coming soon. Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone.

Copy and paste this link into a supported browser to continue:

[https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

<comment><USER26> Right, didn't realise the link here is for early-access (works), not homepage (doesn't).

<comment><USER24> I should of clarified I was referring to the homepage showing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of hypercard!

<comment><USER29> True, though this is closer to OpenDoc which was document-centric: a document would contain widgets from a variety of components, in contrast to an app being a silo for data it created.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like this is an early revision:

> You are looking at Notion 0.5. We are working hard on the 1.0 that would > have a lot more ideas flushed out. Stay tuned, and thank you for your > feedback.

[http://www.producthunt.com/tech/notion-4#comment-147200](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/notion-4#comment-147200)

<comment><USER31> > ideas flushed out.

So there are too many ideas as it is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes, thank you! I can't try this yet since I only have Firefox at this machine, but alternative note-taking and rethinking computer documents is something I've long waited for.

If anyone knows of any similarly "different" projects, please tell me!

</comment><comment><USER33> This looks amazing and the onboarding process is really good.

I wanted to have a block based editor for a project but it felt a bit daunting as this was not the main part of that project.

Did you use anything for the wysiwyg or are you just using execCommand?

</comment><comment> 97-109-107 Obligatory reference to Xandu and Ted Nelson has to be dropped here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu)

Very pretty

<comment><USER12> I think web content creation tools are converging towards the classic notions of hypertext, just like modern programming languages are converging towards what was possible in LISP (but with better^H^H^H^H^H^H syntax) ;-)

These tools are lacking in end-user scriptability though. Something like kimonolabs.com or transformy.io, combined with a WYSIWYM outliner like this, could be the next HyperCards, yet no one (else) has made that connection - yet.

I have ideas on how it should work and put to good use, but I don't have the chops to build it myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love it.

This is what Dropbox notes should have been, but failed to realize.

<comment><USER35> Has notes been released?

<comment><USER34> Nope, but I have access to the beta.</comment></comment></comment>


RTFM or urlslapping? - <AUTHOR>

In the past year I've picked up a term "urlslapping", a gentler version of the classic RTFM.  This is when you answer a question with the easily accessible URL for the answer, commonly when sending instant messages.
Example from today: "Is there any documentation for the memcache protocol?"
Answer: "https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/doc/protocol.txt".
It is sort of a way of saying "if you had just spent a minute looking you could have found it"
I'm not creative enough to have coined a new term, yet when I described this word to someone today they googled it, and swore that I had invented it, and that therefore I was just making shit up when I referred to this as urlslapping.
So am I really the only person to have ever used this term?  Do the rest of you have some name for this practice? <comment><USER2> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+that+for+you&l=1](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=let+me+google+that+for+you&l=1)

:)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't see the "slap" unless someone asks a question about some detail and someone responds with a link to a broad overview. Like, "How does memcached handle XYZ with W if you T, U, or V?" and someone throws out <https://github.com/memcached>.

If someone throws me a useful link, I see that as em trying to help me, not chide me.

</comment><comment><USER4> url slapping is more friendly, and it shows you care enough to do a google search for someone.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if you're the first person, but I've never heard it. Where I come from it's called "spoon-feeding."</comment>


Google denied dotless one word domains - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/12/google_one_word_domains/ <comment><USER2> Quote from the article:

Among the 26 pages of proposed changes [PDF] to the contract signed by the operators of the internet's top-level domains, the following language was inserted:

 _If Registry Operator wishes to place any DNS resource record type or class into its TLD DNS service (other than those listed in Sections 1.1 or 1.2 above), it must describe in detail its proposal and submit a Registry Services Evaluation Process (RSEP) request._

That of course means nothing to anyone but a small group of DNS policy folk but it was enough to prompt an official rebuke from the security and stability advisory committee (SSAC) of DNS overseer ICANN, which published a strongly worded advisory calling for the text to be deleted.

"The possible use of the RSEP process risks delegating any future evaluation of registry proposals on dotless domains to ICANN staff, effectively circumventing the informed NGPC Board resolution to prohibit dotless domains," the advisory [PDF] reads in part.

</comment><comment>====

I still don't understand what's going on here, but it seems like a dirty trick by Google. Do no evil? Glad it failed!

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course they aren't "dotless" \-- they all have a trailing dot!

If you're got and bothered about TLDs acting "weird", require that trailing dot's use if there is an MX or A or AAAA attached -- so "google" won't resolve but "google.com" and "google." would.

Personally, I consider it weird and non-general that TLDs are somehow distinguished from any other domains.</comment>


Show HN: Density – Anonymous People Counter and API - <AUTHOR> http://www.density.io/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> The site is rather vague. They provide the hardware and install it for free, which implies they're selling data to someone else. Who? There's no privacy policy. No terms of service. The "order" button just brings up a blank email.

How does the device tell how many people are present based on counting at a doorframe? Is it counting people passing through the door? Does it detect direction? Is it good enough to estimate the number of people inside by subtracting out counts from in counts? Will this work for wide entrances, such as malls? Is this a passive infrared sensor? Those go blind in hot weather.

This looks like a cheaper alternative to video counting systems, of which there are many. Video systems get about 98% count accuracy. If you already have surveillance cameras, you can often use them for counting. Beyond that, there's queue measurement - not just how many people are in line, but how many gave up and left without buying.[1] (Seven people in a queue is the tipping point – any longer and most shoppers won't bother joining it. After 9 minutes, shoppers are likely to give up queuing and leave empty handed (other research says as little 6 minutes). 70% of customers who leave never come back.)

[1] [http://www.retailsensing.com/queue- management.html](http://www.retailsensing.com/queue-management.html)

<comment><USER3> [Density founder here] Hey Animats, sorry it took me all day to get to your list of questions.

> which implies they're selling data to someone else. Who?

Typically our customers are startups who sell to SMBs (coffee shops, bars, restaurants, museums, etc). They charge merchants anywhere between $50-$500/mo/location for some kind of software or service. These are startups that sell POS systems, loyalty software, marketing services, discounts, handle logistics, and delivery.

> There's no privacy policy. No terms of service.

Frankly, it should have been there before launch but since people don't "buy" through our website, we decided to sacrifice legal thoroughness for speed to launch. Maybe a misstep but people seemed okay emailing us their request to order.

> How does the device tell how many people are present based on counting at a > doorframe?

Two closely situated, parallel infrared distance sensors. We timestamp spikes in voltage as they come in allowing us to see o...1 = entrance. 1...0 = exit. Giving us the current count in a place.

> Is it counting people passing through the door? Direction?

Yes. Not the line outside. Although we can do line detection and estimate wait times. Yes.

> Is it good enough to estimate the number of people inside by subtracting out > counts from in counts?

Yes. It's better than just an estimate.

> Will this work for wide entrances, such as malls? Is this a passive infrared > sensor?

No. Our current model maxes out at roughly 90in -- that's with two sensors on either side of a double door facing one another. No it's AIR.

> 98% count accuracy ... If you already have surveillance cameras, you can > often use them for counting.

You're right. We're just betting that customer-aversion to facial recognition and surveillance cameras is slowing adoption in the long tail of the market we're after - the various independent merchants and sellers that comprise a city and who are too busy making coffee and food to spend too much time on potential controversial technology. See: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/29/philz-coffee-drops- euclid-a...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/29/philz-coffee-drops-euclid- analytics-over-privacy-concerns/)

[edit: for readability]

<comment><USER4> >> Is it good enough to estimate the number of people inside by subtracting out counts from in counts?

> Yes. It's better than just an estimate

What if someone waved their hand in front of it (in a particular direction) in an attempt to subvert it? Couldn't someone trick it into over-reporting or under-reporting the number of people inside?

What if someone is standing idle in front of it (near the door frame) for a few minutes and in the meantime a large number of other people walk in? Will it miss them?

What if two or more people walked in at the same time with no gap between them?

Most importantly: How would the counter ever be able to correct itself from inaccuracies?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic product idea and a landing page that's so good that I figured out what the product does without touching my scroll wheel.

I wish however, you'd include a section that provides a reasonable explanation as to _why_ Workroom got a 950% increase in traffic. I'm thinking that if I saw that a place was full, I'd be less likely to head over there. But, if I didn't know, I'd probably give it a whirl. Alternatively, if I've gone there a bunch of times and it's always been full, I just wouldn't go. What exactly is happening?

<comment><USER6> I think the idea would be that this helps fill dead times. If the place is full, they don't need/want more people showing up just to be turned away. If the place is empty, then they want to advertise that to fill it back up.

Also though, I think it was a 950% increase in traffic to the web pages powered by this product, not to the actual locations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, the increase was on the webpages that included Density to show seating capacity.

<comment><USER7> I also find this particularly confusing/misleading - since you deal mainly with physical locations (often called sites by owners), using the word "site" instead of "web traffic" seems odd. Also, listing a web based metric as large as 950% without any type of time interval really kills the true significance of that metric.

<comment><USER8> My favorite statistic: 73.6% of all statistics are made up.

My 2nd favorite: 950% of 0 is 0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >> "After adding Density, we saw as much as a 950% increase in site traffic to supported locations. Our users love it." \- Darren Buckner, Workfrom CEO

When I use google maps, it shows me how busy various roads are and it also chooses the fastest route based on how fluid the traffic is. Seems like google maps is just observing the world and making decisions based on those observations.

Now I was wondering, what if all the drivers used google maps at the same time ?

Wouldn't it mean that google maps is influencing and even _creating_ the traffic patterns ?

Same here - just measuring the 'density' has the effect of actually influencing it which is an interesting outcome and resembles quantum mechanics voodoo stuff :).

<comment><USER10> I live in Boulder and this happens all the time during ski season. When traveling towards I-70 there's a longer, more circuitous route which breaks off of Highway 6 and goes through Idaho Springs. This path is longer, but cuts off the beginning of the initial drive into the Front Range... it's also just a two lane mountain road.

Sometimes google maps will detect heavy traffic on I-70 and start re-routing drivers the other way... unfortunately this very quickly creates a bottleneck that Google Maps can't detect in time (traffic goes from 0mph to 60mph to 0mph in the mountains) so it'll continue to funnel people down that "shortcut" until the traffic essentially equalizes with the I-70 traffic.

There's an even worse side effect, as those who went through Idaho Springs eventually have to get back onto I-70 to get to the ski resorts, so now that on ramp (which is a metered on ramp) backs up, further hurting both I-70 and the "shortcut" traffic. It's a real terrible feedback loop that essentially is caused by Google Maps not being able to adequately predict how much traffic the Idaho Springs route can handle, which seems like a hard problem to solve (especially generally).

Edit: Thought about this more and realized predicting ski traffic is more or less a proxy for predicting the weather, so I highly doubt this is a fixable problem (at least in this specific case)

<comment><USER11> Would you be willing to report this to the Maps team? If not, just reply and I'll get in touch with someone about it.

<comment><USER10> Can't seem to find where to file this bug since it's not a physical mapping error. Coincidentally the Maps team is in the Boulder office, are they not? I guess I could just walk down and say hi :)

Feel free to connect me with the right people, my email is in my profile

<comment><USER11> Try this:

[https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/6194894?hl=en](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/6194894?hl=en)

\----

Your directions were wrong

At this time, you can't report wrong turns from your phone or tablet, but you can report them on your computer.

Open Google Maps on your computer. Click Directions directions button image. Enter the starting point and destination for the route for which your directions were wrong. In the bottom right of the map, click Report a problem.

\----

I'm working on getting a human contact involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please don't be too clever for your own good - let me Cmd-Click on the links to open in a new tab.

I don't want to be taken away from your page, I want to continue reading more about YOUR product before I go to view your "partner" sites. Same goes for your API, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER13> This is obnoxious website behavior, and I equate it to sites ignorantly disabling right-clicking because they're paranoid someone will steal their photos. If your site contains any links at all, you should never, ever be breaking such basic browser functionality. The only possible legitimate use case would be a webapp which is attempting to create a desktop-style environment, and even then, co-opting the CTRL or ALT keys is likely not the best course of action.

<comment><USER14> I disable right click on my Website.

<comment><USER15> For what reason? This is easily bypassed.

<comment><USER16> If you visit his website [0] it's (at least I hope) intentionally poor designed, everything terrible straight from the late 90's in web design. From marquee, blinking, embedded mp3, and more.

There's a built-in bypass in the site.js to allow the context menu if shift is held, though you still get the alert. Or it's just that holding shift allows the context menu to appear after the alert. I don't actually know.

      document.body.oncontextmenu = function() {
        alert('Please dont right click!!')
        return window.event.shiftKey // top secret
       }

[0] bitfission.com

<comment><USER17> That is an amazing website, including the MP3-rendered MIDI, and I'm now pretty sure the comment was a joke that everyone missed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does this need to connect to your servers? What happens if you become insolvent? Why can't I just buy the damn thing then use it? Why do I have to pay for a subscription to a service which is effectively a simple proxy between the device and my infrastructure?

<comment><USER19> That is my biggest thought. If this is oriented to hackers, let me own the thing so I can do some _really_ cool stuff with it.

<comment><USER18> I hate this user hostile trend among hardware startups, that is requiring/involving third party "cloud" infrastructure for no particular reason other than to extort money out of customers.

<comment><USER20> The hardware sounds dead simple, not to mention cheap. The service is the actual product here.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the hardware is simple. How would you design something like this? I've thought about this problem for years and no elegant solution has occured until I saw this.

<comment><USER15> Hmm? Two beams detecting directionality + WiFi?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Had no idea what this was. Clicked link. Within one minute I figured out what Density is. Nice job on the landing page!

IMO, this is the strongest section: [http://www.density.io/#comparison](http://www.density.io/#comparison)

<comment><USER3> At one point we went as far as to quiz our moms. "Mom, what does Density do? What does it cost? Do we sell surveillance cameras?"

After she got 9/10 correct (she's 58)... she looks at me and says, "Ship it, Andrew. Ship it."

<comment><USER11> "Hacker News Tested, Mom Approved".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't camera systems beat this in pretty much every way? [http://www.placemeter.com/](http://www.placemeter.com/) comes to mind.

You don't have to resort to infrared sensors in order to provide anonymity, but they do inherently limit you potential accuracy and metrics you can prodive. It all comes down to where the data is processed and what is made available. Also, cheap camera components are coming down fast due to economies of scale, not sure how IR will play out in the long haul.

<comment><USER3> Yeah... I mean I appreciate that people pay lip-service to privacy but a surveillance camera that counts you as a distinct individual without your consent is an invasion of privacy. The cost is higher than the price tag, homie.

 _Edit_ I am an employee of Density and definitely biased.

<comment><USER23> I am a PM at Placemeter. We do not "use facial recognition software" in our algorithms, as Density's website claims of video-based systems. None of our algorithms use biometric markers for our counting—we're essentially the same "dumb" counters as Density's IR with the added advantage of accuracy and area of coverage.

Placemeter does much more than pay lip service to privacy. We pride ourself on our privacy efforts. If you want to lear more about them, @afar email me: email@example.com

<comment><USER3> I am curious. Particularly with your new sensor. It sounded like much of the video processing happens on the unit itself, meaning faces never reach Placemeter servers. Is it accurate to say that you're only getting counts and movement data?

My other question is how you derive count without uniquely identifying someone. If I'm entering a shop and a PM sensor sees me, will it know when I leave?

<comment><USER23> Great questions.

1) the processing is happening aboard the sensor, counts are what are sent back to the servers

2) we don't do unique identification like that. We use object detection, which is different than using unique biometric markers like face detection. That means that we can track a person or a car within a frame of view, but not if they exit and re-enter the frame like in the case you described.

Does Density still use wifi pinging for part of its counts?

<comment><USER3> That's really interesting. Given a certain level of granularity, would it be possible for a person to have a unique object signature? I guess at that point, you'd just use a face. Just curious.

No wifi pinging. After Apple almost killed us a year ago with their MAC address policy change and we realized there was significant push back on privacy, we dropped the technology altogether.

<comment><USER23> Not quite sure I understand your question. We store counts, not individual object IDs, so at an individual granularity it would be the same as your IR device counting one person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any plans to offer a "disconnected" version where I could push this data to my own aggregator+API instance? Use case for me would be where foot traffic numbers would itself be sensitive data.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't in the pipeline but shoot us an email and maybe we can work something out: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Our student consulting group, Optimir, worked with Density to test their product around UC Berkeley's campus. It's a fantastic product, and we're really excited to get these installed permanently in libraries, coffeeshops, and weight rooms around campus.

</comment><comment><USER26> (some) Kroger chain stores have a similar technology [1] to this to determine how many cashiers are needed at any given time! Neat stuff!

[1] [http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive- insig...](http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and- innovation/kroger-solves-top-customer-issue-long-lines/d/d-id/1141541)

</comment><comment><USER27> Bug report: In Firefox, when on this page [1], clicking on the Density logo in the top left takes me to [http://www.density.io/undefined](http://www.density.io/undefined)

Looks like you've got a JS issue in there somewhere.

[1] [http://www.density.io/?ref=hn](http://www.density.io/?ref=hn)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Fixing it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a few questions for the Density folks:

\- How well does it handle people walking in side by side?

\- What about someone pushing a cart or stroller?

\- Can it tell if someone is walking in or out?

\- How far does the laser reach? Would I need two sensors if I had a double or triple wide door?

\- I assume these are battery powered? How long do they last?

</comment><comment><USER29> I have always wanted to build something like this since I was a kid. The biggest driving thought was to make traffic signals dynamic and build a central communication system for a city's transport.

Really glad to see a product coming into the regular consumer space for this :)

</comment><comment><USER30> I spoke with Andrew over at density.io.

His answers regarding can it see the traffic direction (answer - yes for each individual) and how it is powered (custom length power cable, cut at install time for both sensor and base) are inline in this thread.

Also Andrew explained the base gathers info from all the sensors for counts.

I asked also about people in a group - most doorways are a physical narrowing that automatically places people in single file. If the doorway is wider than that, they can place a sensor on either side (my assumption is that these results are then filtered so a person is not counted 2x).

</comment><comment><USER31> Does this use PIR out of curiosity, or are you using an emitter, receiver in one package.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're using infrared sensors. Both the emitter and detector are on a single sensor, so we only affix our hardware to one side of a doorframe. This is different than break beam which requires hardware on each side of a door.

<comment><USER32> How much accuracy do you lose when people are dressed up in full winter gear?

<comment><USER33> When you would wear metamaterial stealth suits maybe you can avoid being detected by our IR sensors, we're curious as to what you have available!

<comment><USER34> Incredibly accurate and anonymous seem to be at tension here. A discussion on your signal processing would be illuminating.

<comment><USER33> We made our own AIR door counter, composed of a few distance sensors. It can tell us in which direction a person is passing, and gives a distance profile that we process to distinguish individual people. Technically, we measure your circumference to some degree, but you might agree that is far from enough to compromise your anonimity.

<comment><USER34> AIR being active infrared as opposed to passive (or a particular waveband)?

Anonymity is a more interesting problem than "can distance sensors uniquely identify a passerby among 500M North Americans" as your reply implies. What if you are the roundest or tiniest person in town? All the sudden you are uniquely identifiable.

You're early in development, and I bet whoever did the circumference estimation has more in mind. I imagine you could make a good estimation of a person's height from your data: whether the profile sees knees hips or hands. Can you identify the asymmetric waist bulge of a CHL carrier? Does your infrared band penetrate polyesters but not cotton? I hope the reader's feature-vector blood is flowing at this point.

Your page needs to have way more formalization around the concept of anonymity (outside of the registration required area) for me to feel that you are appreciating the problem from an engineering perspective and not a marketing one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Looks great! It could be very nice with public transportation, so I'll be able to know beforehand which wagons are not overcrowded.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is pretty awesome. I mentioned doing something like this at the IoT talk I gave, I had read a paper on counting animals by their heat signature for conservation purposes and thought something along those lines would be a simple replacement for the 'walk through the door ring a bell' detectors, and given that a 32bit ARM Cortex-M is about $1.25 you could do that for not much more money than the old light + photocell.

Something the paper pointed out was that while the temperature from animal to animal varied, the _same_ animal often kept the same temperature (+/\- epsilon) when moving from sensor to sensor and that give some idea of uniqueness.

And while I also love kefka's solution I think the face recognition stuff gets a more Orwellian reaction than just tracking heat sources.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ok. So businesses already have cameras. Yeah, privacy, schmiravacy. That horse has done gone left the barn.

So, the second problem with cameras/face tracking is cost?

I wrote this: [https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho](https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho)

It does what your hardware does, but also does facial recognition. It's still early in the build process, but I'm working on a commercial (non-QT) version of this.

But right now, it can accurately count unique people, as well as remember people. So when Jane walks in front of the camera, it remembers that her database number is 1234. Tomorrow, it will also remember that she's 1234. And tracking is all stored in few XML config files for easy calculation.

<comment><USER38> > Yeah, privacy, schmiravacy. That horse has done gone left the barn.

So you're using the slippery slope as justification and welcome sign instead of warning. The world is all downhill from here exactly because people don't have the integrity and courage to resist.

Also

<comment><USER37> Slippery slope? Humans already can do classification. Should we ban humans from identifying and counting other humans?

I can hire 2 guards who can remember people by taking a photo. And then I can have them recall who shows up. With people.

All my project does is substitute a computer for human. The only reason why we don't do the above is because people cost a lot more. Computer software and cycles are cheap.

And the procedure I used with my code saves a hash of the face. I cannot generate faces from the hash, although it would be a one liner to spool a face to the hard drive when a pic is captured. My software doesn't do that.

<comment><USER34> You see, humans have judgement, and obvious presence. I don't mind George and Jim remembering I was at the pub on Tuesday, because they will consider who to reveal that information to before they do. (A pub I don't think anyone would be at if there were two guards photographing everyone). These giant piles of databases are open for everyone.

<comment><USER37> Doesn't the business have a right to keep track of its clientèle? Obvious legalities of underage-ness of a pub aside, I already can hire counters that watch the security feed and assess numbers.

And also, CCTV isn't open to the public or traded around wanton. Instead, I would argue, this data is highly confidential to the business and therefore would guard it selfishly.

And as for the pub photographing: There has been a trend in bars in Indianapolis to scan he barcode on the back of the drivers license to "verify identity". What they're really doing is building up a clientèle database for which they can do whatever with. And they are booming bars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This reminds me of Motionloft. Their CEO was an idiot and ran into some legal trouble [1] which hurt the company, but it was backed by Mark Cuban and is still running afaik. I have thought since first learning about Motionloft that this could be a big business but I don't understand why both companies refuse to just sell the hardware. There have to be a ton of companies that would buy it but don't want their very sensitive data about customer counts etc. being transferred to a third party that could be hacked etc.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/cuzyolo/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/01/cuzyolo/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Soo I thought I had seen this somewhere, just with WiFi used to measure users, turns out it comes straight from the past![0]

In the interests of science, why did you switch from WiFi signals to infra-red door counters? Was it that you picked up passersby? (See [1] for previous pitch, which explains it more than the archive.org website)

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140605031145/http://www.densit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140605031145/http://www.density.io/)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGa9-QUDWo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRGa9-QUDWo)

</comment><comment><USER41> Something like one of those points rewards cards with rfid and this could allow a merchant to get your purchase data as you enter the premises. Then with other rfid readers throughout the store you can pinpoint where $user spends most time and adjust $coupon for them to incite purchase. Or maybe multiple IR beams like this one in different parts of the store to have traffic metrics on the floor plan. Looks very nice from the design standpoint. It is something that will not register in the mind of the customer.

If this interests you:

This type of thing can be done at the hobby level. Since this is mostly an IR sensor with wifi connectivity talking to an API and sending mqtt data.

<comment><USER42> There are already solutions that do this using your phone's wifi: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/10/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/10/19/how-stores-use-your-phones-wifi-to-track-your-shopping- habits/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Great product and great team. Congrats everyone!

</comment><comment><USER44> How does your product compare to existing traffic solutions, like Shoppertrak?

<comment><USER3> Cheap and anonymous by design. Also, we're not after big retail. We're after everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There many similar startups over the world:

[http://sensalytics.net](http://sensalytics.net) \- Deutch project counting people, mobile tracking and cash register data.

[http://i-counter.ru](http://i-counter.ru) \- Russian projects - uses IR counter with 3G transmission module, so data send directly to web analytics server without additional networking devices.

</comment><comment><USER46> Looks like an awesome product and hardware but the SAAS model sucks (for us). Here's to hoping they release a LAN model for a one time fee.

</comment><comment><USER47> Your home page freezes my Firefox (33.1 on Mac) :( . Have to pound through five or six unresponsive script warnings.

After that, pretty cool idea and nice site!

<comment><USER3> Sorry. If you can email team AT density.io with a bug report or something that shows the latency that would be really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This seems really cool! I can think of a bunch of new things to do with this and a lot of places where I want to know how busy they are.

The one thing that really confuses me is the pricing structure. Why do you need to pay each month? Paying $300 for one year of usage seems pretty steep.

It's service pricing but it seems like one-time service/purchase.

</comment><comment><USER49> This looks awesome! Would love to know ahead of time how crowded my local coffee shop is before I packed up to work there.

<comment><USER50> If this is the indented use case what purpose the coffee shop have to add one? If in most cases it'll only discourage customer attendance.

To be a member of _the queue_ of an establishment can carry some of the social status of that establishment itself. This is a primative notion yes, but fairly ingrained culturally. As businesses often judge their _prestige_ by the length of the queue to enter.

<comment><USER51> Too long of a queue could discourage customer attendance as well, as people may not want to wait a long time, no matter how prestigious the business is. In addition, a lesser-known business could use lower wait times as a competitive advantage.

What really matters, in my opinion, is whether having a long line during certain peak times generates more revenue for the business (by being able to charge more, or by gaining attention due to its long queues) or whether providing a faster and better customer experience with shorter wait times does (and perhaps more customers during non-peak times)

Whether one is better than the other may depend completely on your business. Also, I'm not sure this technology forces you to publish your current density information. You could simply use the information for business intelligence gathering and for providing promotions during non-peak times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> How do these talk with the outside world? Do you need to attach them to your own internal WiFi?

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Currently we piggy-back on a locations wifi. Relatively low upstream data (37kb / 90secs).

We've considered things like Helium. Eventually centralizing the network will be good but for now, wifi's cheap and available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Gorgeous web design, kudos.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Took a long time to get the right balance of imagery, icons, and copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone know why is this product "Show HN" while the other product currently on the front page, Soloshot, only has a product name and slogan?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did the Show HN. The original title was "Density Platform" because we just revealed our new sensors and the public facing API. Not sure why a mod changed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There will be a big business putting these on all the entrances of a publicly- traded casino and then tracking activity levels.

</comment><comment><USER56> What communications protocol is it using?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're using infrared sensors to detect ingresses and egresses from locations.

<comment><USER50> How does the solution handle multi-ingress/egress points?

Could it be used for tracking population leaving during a fire drill? As often this is the first question asked by first responders, "Is anyone still inside?"

<comment><USER7> This would be a reallly cool application if PIR's were capable of counting "horde" foot traffic, like a giant mass of people streaming out of a door during an alarm. I don't think that something like a PIR could handle that number of people, since it's just the single beam.

<comment><USER3> I really like you, for some reason. I think it's your green handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Looking forward to hearing more about it when you're ready to share

</comment><comment><USER58> Could this be done with Apple's iBeacon as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> It can! To accomplish this there'd need to be a custom iPhone app for a location and everyone that goes in would have to have the application installed and have their bluetooth turned on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Foot traffic should be inexpensive, accurate, and available in real-time. It should be dead simple to integrate with other applications, and it should never invade people's privacy.

imo.</comment>


A unikernel experiment: A VM for every URL - <AUTHOR> http://www.skjegstad.com/blog/2015/03/25/mirageos-vm-per-url-experiment/

<comment><USER2> Already exists for Erlang. Here is a demo:

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

Site is running on such a VM as well, press escape for a console to see stats.

Here is an example output from running their demo:

\---

300 sec : is how long it takes to launch a Linux instance to availability on Amazon EC2.

50 sec : is the time between power on and the lock screen for an Android phone.

0.4 sec : ago is when we received your request. Within this time we managed to create a new Xen instance, boot it, and run the application that rendered the page you are viewing. By the time you are done reading this, the instance will be gone.

\---

<comment><USER3> Note that both of the setups are quite different in how they boot unikernels. The EoX Zerg demo boots one unikernel per connection by having an HTTP proxy in the frontend spin up the VM.

Magnus' version builds a static set of unikernels whose total resource usage is known ahead of time, and boots them based on DNS lookups as necessary. Because there is a race between a DNS response, the first TCP SYN from the client, and the VM booting up to receive it, there is a helper unikernel called "Synjitsu" which terminates TCP connections and replays them to the MirageOS unikernel as soon as it boots up. This is very easy due to the OCaml TCP/IP stack in Synjitsu sharing its state via serialising it into an s-expression. More gory details in [http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-nsdi- jitsu.pdf](http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-nsdi-jitsu.pdf)

Now, imagine a version of Synjitsu that did this handover with TLS connections rather than just TCP. The recipient unikernel wouldn't ever even have to know the private key, just the ephemeral session key...

<comment><USER2> That is just a demo to show startup times. Presumably (just by looking at it from a high level) a proxy instance for handling initial connection + a pre- allocated, or maybe booted but paused, set of worker images would work in either architecture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suppose work like this is demonstrating that, contrary to what e.g. the creators of Docker say, a virtual machine image is _not_ too heavyweight to be our industry's equivalent of a shipping container. What is too heavyweight is a VM image of a conventional operating system distribution with all of the baggage that it brings.

Would these fine-grained unikernels also run well on KVM, VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, or bhyve (FreeBSD's new VMM)? Or is Xen uniquely suited to this kind of thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _" What is too heavyweight is a VM image of a conventional operating system > distribution with all of the baggage that it brings."_

Indeed. I didn't realise that Docker/Container folks had ever said VMs were too heavyweight. Is this linked anywhere?

> _" Would these fine-grained unikernels also run well on KVM, VMware ESXi, > Hyper-V, or bhyve (FreeBSD's new VMM)?"_

We've been asked this before and for KVM at least, it just boils down to someone suitably motivated to write the boot and VirtIO code [1, 2]. If anyone's interested in this, we'd love to hear about it [3]!

[1] [http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos- devel/201...](http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos- devel/2014-08/msg00103.html)

[2] [http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos- devel/201...](http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos- devel/2015-01/msg00034.html)

[3] [http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi- bin/mailman/listinfo/mirageo...](http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi- bin/mailman/listinfo/mirageos-devel)

<comment><USER4> > Indeed. I didn't realise that Docker/Container folks had ever said VMs were > too heavyweight. Is this linked anywhere?

[https://github.com/docker/docker#user-content-better-than- vm...](https://github.com/docker/docker#user-content-better-than-vms)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. In hindsight that should have been an obvious place for me to look.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The next step is to compile it all to JS and just serve static files that boot in the browser! :) Something like [http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/)

<comment><USER6> See: [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always thought that something really cool could be done with unikernel for SaaS: you let each of your customer have a VM on their own, spinning the unikernel up when the requests came in, and let it process any request come in, after a while, if the specific user stop requesting then you kill the VM. There seems to be a lot of benefits from that: single user authentication, horizontally scaling is simple ("vertical" scaling also get easier as you can just move VM away), app design will easily let it become an on premise installation. Code upgrade is also easier as it won't disturb everyone at once, and you can upgrade when the VM is not running for a specific user (no hotswap needed). There is definitely operational overhead in a DNS server, but besides that it seems like the benefits would outweight the cons.

I know that's what DabbleDB was doing back then (in Squeak Smalltalk, each of their users has a smalltalk VM serving them). Is there anyone else doing anything similar nowadays?

<comment><USER3> That sort of design is what motivated Magnus' post that has been linked here. We've been laying the uniSaaS groundwork with a new Xen toolstack daemon called Jitsu ("Just in Time Summoning of Unikernels").

Here's the camera ready paper that we'll be presenting at USENIX NSDI in May: [http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-nsdi- jitsu.pdf](http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2015-nsdi-jitsu.pdf)

There's a lot more besides just the spawning to build a robust SaaS of course, but you can see the direction we're heading in...

<comment><USER8> I think the obstacle is that most folk are not prepared to give up their languages for this, so containerising PaaSes are still likely to dominate the scene.

Disclaimer: I worked on Cloud Foundry.

<comment><USER3> > I think the obstacle is that most folk are not prepared to give up their > languages

s/languages/frameworks, and I agree. One step at a time -- this work is a foundational block that we're building on, not the ultimate solution.

<comment><USER8> Hm. Got me thinking about how to fit unikernels into the CF architecture, which is largely taking containers (Garden or Docker, take your pick) as the unit of currency at the low level.

It looks like the place to make the change would be in Diego in the Executor[0][1] component, which currently implements behaviour in terms of containers (using Linux-Garden as the container system).

So long as you can conceptually fit into the Receptor Actions API[2] it looks as though unikernels would be a plausible addition to Executor. Once you have that, you can either wire into Lattice[3] or a full Cloud Foundry installation as a first-class citizen.

Disclaimer: I'm not as familiar with Diego as other CFers are, so it's possible I'm just making stuff up.

[0] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry- incubator/executor](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/executor)

[1] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-design- notes](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-design-notes)

[2] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry- incubator/receptor/blob/mast...](https://github.com/cloudfoundry- incubator/receptor/blob/master/doc/actions.md)

[3] [http://lattice.cf/](http://lattice.cf/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, this are all _really_ helpful pointers! It's particularly useful to find Lattice, which seems to be a simpler entry point than a full CF setup.

<comment><USER8> The shiny website was new to me. I wonder if we've officially announced it yet?

In any case, we started the Lattice effort last year to make it easier for people to play with Diego without having to stand up a whole Cloud Foundry installation.

My only Lattice-related claim to fame is not knowing what is was: [https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/lattice- app/issue...](https://github.com/pivotal-cf-experimental/lattice-app/issues/1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fun thing about this is that you can try it out locally and apparently it took (about) an afternoon to put together (most of the work is in rewriting URLs).

This kind of fast experimentation is going to lead to some really cool things happening with unikernels.

</comment><comment><USER9> I seem to remember something similar that was an erlang VM running (I think) directly on Xen. The underlying idea in that case was each _request_ causes a new VM to boot, service that request, then terminate.

<comment><USER10> Mentioned in another top-level comment: [http://erlangonxen.org/](http://erlangonxen.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is an interesting experiment in moving the computation to the endpoints of a namespace. I would suggest a variant where instead of a VM you place a Fossil file

[https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fileform...](https://www.fossil- scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fileformat.wiki)

Using that you can store a whole filesystem at the URL instead of one file, and you also get synchronization mechanisms built in, so your endpoints can communicate with each other in a structured way that you control.. vs the undefined communication you will get between VM's if you try this with the VM architecture.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure what the applications/market for this is or could be, but I love the idea. Everything that goes "micro" I love dearly.

<comment><USER13> I'm no DNS or security expert, but couldn't one application be increased security of connections? E.g. it's harder to do that 0day kernel hack with a buffer overflow if every URL request is sandboxed in a VM?

I probably got it wrong but I'd love to hear a more expert opinion on why/why not this could be used for security..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> " I have not been able to find a hosting provider that has a minimum configuration which would be appropriate for large or small unikernels (e.g. 8MB vs 64MB RAM)." This is the biggest problem with unikernels right now.

<comment><USER5> Looks like an arbitrage opportunity! Buy 64MB server, sell 8MB servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Similar to ZeroVM [0], where a VM is spawned and destroyed for each individual request.

[0] [http://www.zerovm.org/](http://www.zerovm.org/)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is something I've been _dreaming_ of. It is lovely to see it coming into the world. Death to the website! Long live the UX in a container!

<comment><USER17> This is better than a "container." A Mirage unikernel literally compiles in the pieces of an "OS" as libraries. There is no monolithic operating system with code sitting around waiting to be exploited. The web server in this example _is_ the kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is cool, especially when you think of the opportunities it offers for DDoS prevention.

<comment><USER19> Can you tell us more about these opportunities?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When do we upgrade from IPv6?</comment>


NASA's Curiosity Rover Sharpens Paradox of Ancient Mars - <AUTHOR> http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6734&utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NASAJPL&utm_content=daily20170206-1#.WJlBs6uEyNQ.hackernews <comment><USER2> I've heard about a scenario where Jupiter once wreaked havoc on the orbits of the inner planets, pushing some of them closer to the Sun and pulling others further away. (It's not the Nice model [1] but some unorthodox variation of it.)

Could Mars have been closer to the Sun when this lake existed (3.5 billion years ago), or is that too late in the history of the Solar System for any major disturbance to have happened?

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

<comment><USER3> I think you're refering to the Grand tack hypothesis[0], but Wikipedia is scarce on details as to how that scenario could've affected Mars orbit.

I was trying to see if this had a timeline, because the NASA cites lack of CO2 as far as -3.5GY, but there isn't enough detail in Wikipedia and my 5 minutes slack time is over :(

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it possible that other greenhouse gasses than CO2 were present that helped keep water liquid? Or maybe the planet produced enough internal heat to warm up the surface beyond freezing? Or atmosphere, whatever it was, was thick enougj to produce high pressures that kept water liquid despite freezing temperatures?

Surely if water was liquid and CO2 was not there, those must be the only possible scenarios? Or a combination of them, of course.

<comment><USER5> Methane is more potent than CO2, but fairly short lived. Maybe Mars had more Methane in the distant past? If a 95% CO2 atmosphere isn't enough green house gas for liquid water, I'd assume internal heat played some sort of role.

<comment><USER6> My guess is methane as well, Mars still "breathes" out methane occasionally[1]. Given that chunks of Mars have been kicked off the planet and landed on Earth, I wonder if you modeled a chunk of Titan's methane ice being kicked off Titan and hitting Mars would have the effect of filling out enough of Mars' atmosphere to warm it.

[1] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1758](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1758)</comment></comment></comment>


Atlassian Eyes Future of Development - <AUTHOR> https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/atlassian-eyes-future-of-development/ <comment><USER2> They'll be watching from the back seat.

Does anyone have any examples of innovative products coming from Atlassian recently?</comment>


Ask HN: Proposal for Managing the Addictiveness of This Site - <AUTHOR>

My partner and I were just talking about this business of how addictive HN is and how even certain industrious founders are struggling to balance it with other stuff. Turning the site off for a few hours a day seems a bit... heavy-handed. How about leveraging the power of shame instead? Here's our proposal:

    Public Humiliation
 1. You can go to the Profile page and promise to be off the site for X hours.
2. During the X hours, your username is colored differently to show how virtuous you are.
3. If you break your promise, your username gets colored RED to publicly shame you and reveal your weakness to the world.
You could do it without #2, but I like that step. I think it would feel more like a game to see who else was playing. Also, seeing lots of people keeping their promises would nudge me in the same direction. <comment><USER2> It'll pass. It did for me, anyway. For about two or three months, I was here _all the time_. I was clicking "override" on the procrastination page five or ten times a day. But, it came from being unfocused about my work--I didn't have a clear, and exciting, vision of where I was going or how to get there, so I was putting off doing anything.

I did two things:

1\. Started working on music again (which always excites me, but I had to give myself permission to take time off for something fun--I was wasting that time dicking around on the Internet, anyway, so I might as well have something to show for that time).

2\. Sat down one day and figured out the overarching vision for my company and my development for the next week, month, and three months (don't think too far ahead--it causes paralysis because the job looks too big). This triggered several great ideas for big visible improvements in the product that don't cost me much time or effort or money (outsourcing brain-dead tasks to cheap labor, for example--for our website builder, for example, I just got 50 new Open Source templates added for $149...this would have taken two or three full days of my time, on a task that would make me nauseous with its tediousness, but for the guy who did it, it was easily a couple of weeks normal wages). Some of these ideas expanded my productivity dramatically, because it takes the work off of my plate almost entirely, but it still gets done.

What I'm saying is that if spending your time _here_ is satisfying your accomplishment receptors better than your own work, then you're probably doing your own work wrong. You're treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Oh, and leave yourself something unfinished at the end of each day (this is old hat for GTD people, but I never really paid attention to any of that stuff). It actually works if you have something to do each day _instead_ of going to HN first, you'll probably find you just keep doing things rather than reading random crap on the Internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll have to take my word for it, but we definitely have a clear and exciting vision of where we're going and how to get there... of course we could still be going about it wrong. But the main point of the post is just that since a lot of people seem to have the same problem, maybe we could use psychology to finesse it. Even if everybody just goes and browses some other site, it would still be an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER3> How small are your tasks? I've found that once I've broken things down into the "Okay, I can get that done in the next hour" level, I'd almost rather just do it instead of saying I'll do it later. But if my tasks are "Okay, we'll get this done in the next month", I'll be like "Eh, a month's a long time, I can do it later."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's my fault for not being clearer, but you guys missed the point of the post. I'm not asking for advice about procrastination issues (I have some, but they're not that bad) and the general subject has been done to death already.

The point is that _given_ that a lot of people have this problem (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=446924>), here's a suggestion of something new to try.

Of the comments that do address the specific proposal (of shame-based noprocrast), there have been two objections. (1) Some people say they're not influenced by anybody else's opinion, or shouldn't be. I call that self- deception. (2) Others say it would be better to just stop procrastinating. Of course it would. That's like prescribing "sleep" for insomnia.

I still think it's a cool idea that would make for a fun experiment.

Edit: by the way, while I've facetiously emphasized the shame aspect, I don't think that's all there is to it. Lots of people have noticed that if you make a public commitment to do something, you're more likely to follow through. There's a lot of experimental data on that too.

</comment><comment><USER4> "noprocast" in the settings has been wonderful for me. The only thing I'd change is add -1 karma when you click override :)

<comment><USER5> _"noprocast" in the settings has been wonderful for me. The only thing I'd change is add -1 karma when you click override_

How about it, PG? Will you give that "antifeature" a test?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like i care what people on the internet think. I am a pretty shameless person, so this is a bad idea IN MY CASE. Maybe it will help other people, i don't know.

The problem is more fundamental than that, procrastination seems to be a big problem with a lot of people here on HN, including me. I've been searching for answers and ways of countering it, i have thought a lot about the causes and effects.

My conclusion is that it is not HN that is the problem, procrastination is deeper that that, HN doesn't have anything unique that makes it addictive, there are many activities that are addictive in the same way, and a lot of them are offline, so its not an internet problem. Its a human problem. I have found that i am more productive without internet though, but not that much, it just takes me longer to find distractions.

</comment><comment><USER7> The problem for me is that stories are so time-sensitive. For example, there are a _lot_ of good stories that never get to the front page, and if I want to see them, I have to continually refresh the "new" page. I hate that, but it's something I find myself doing.

<comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

<comment><USER7> Does that tell you how many upvotes and comments each story has received? Certainly I could use that to continually poll the site and tell me.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't look like it does. That would be a good feature

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just edited my /etc/hosts to point this and most other procrastination sites at localhost. The work day is for working. Now I have only two options at my desk, either stare blankly or figure out the next task and do it. I unblock it once a week or so to keep current.

<comment><USER3> You ever find yourself staring blankly? I've done that myself sometimes - it's kinda depressing, that even with all distractions removed, I still can't bring myself to do what I'm supposed to be doing.

<comment><USER10> On the other hand, I sometimes get a big moment of super-productive flow after mostly staring blankly and doing nothing for like 20 minutes or more (or even several episodes like this in the day). But those 20 minutes are indeed really depressing so what usually happens is that I'll stare blankly a few minutes, then get overrun by depression and just give up and land on HN or something else unproductive, to "get my moral back up".

But I feel I could get really productive regularly if I just faced up that fear more readily. I wonder if maybe the big depression that accompanies this staring blankly and doing nothing is just my brain working in the background and realizing the intricate details of my complex task, and I interrupt the process when I'm just beginning to get real productive in the background.

Just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this is silly. to quote richard feynman, what do you care what other people think?

<comment><AUTHOR> You think humans aren't affected by this kind of thing? Are you aware of the myriads of data showing that we are? Even the people who think they aren't. Probably _especially_ the people who think they aren't. Which is basically everybody.

<comment><USER11> I accept that most people (including most people who deny it) care deeply what other people think (in many but not all areas). Many people care so much about it that they will sooner hurt their children than do something in public that they think their neighbors disapprove of. A few bright lights such as Feynman care what other people think only in a more limited fashion.

But so what? People can and should try to better themselves. Consider a person who is pursuing the honorable goal of caring less about what other people. I think he would not want to participate in your public humiliation plan; it would harm his progress.

PS I also don't like to see people humiliated. I think being sensitive to suffering, and not embracing plans to cause it, is a good trait too.

<comment><AUTHOR> _your public humiliation plan_

 _don't like to see people humiliated_

I hope your namesake had more of a sense of humor than this, or I'm going to have to lower my opinion of the pre-Socratics.

<comment><USER11> Your plan relies on the fact that people _would_ find the "public humiliation" unpleasant. Whatever you want to call it (I just repeated your words), being unpleasant is an integral part of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about a top losers list... users who are using the site the most every day.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd rest most of the blame with the people, not the site (no offense) -- if you become "addicted" to this site, you'll probably become "addicted" to other sites too.

</comment><comment><USER14> fwiw, I built a facebook app on this exact premise (shame): <http://apps.facebook.com/friendlybets></comment>


Why Teens Don't and Won't Tweet - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_teens_dont_and_wont_tweet.php

<comment><USER2> Hasn't the writer heard of Justin Bieber? Who does he think his 6 million followers are? I actually think Bieber might be a big reason why more and more teenagers ARE starting to tweet. I recently did interviews with High School kids and was surprised to hear how many of them used twitter.

<comment><USER3> Just because Justin Bieber has 6m followers, doesn't mean any of them tweet.

Twitter has always been more of a 'broadcast to followers' than a conversational tool.

<comment><USER4> > Twitter has always been more of a 'broadcast to followers' than a > conversational tool.

Can you substantiate this in any way? This doesn't match my experiences using twitter at all.

<comment><USER5> A friend of mine who got on the featured users list and went from 10,000 followers to 1,000,000 followers said it was like nothing changed. The number of @replies and RTs didn't increase noticeably at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These type of articles seem to come from a basic assumption that non-teens do tweet.

There's a gap between both MSM and the blogosphere and reality here. The blogosphere is attracted to Twitter since it likes new technology and constant self promotion. MSM is like the parents of a teen, trying to relate to their world and hanging to some band name etc they picked up.

In reality, Twitter plays a much smaller part in people's lives than it does in ReadWriteWeb or CNN.

<comment><USER7> This is a very true statement. My geek friends and I tweet all the time, but I was trying to get my girlfriend to sign up and she outright refuses. It is easier as geeks here to see the benefits of services like Twitter, but in the real world (and also in the teen world) it just isn't that important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's foolish to take the position of spokesperson for a generation.

Talk about yourself and your own group of friends by all means, but don't speak for everyone your age. It's not realistically possible to speak for the majority without a lot of research.

<comment><USER9> The author had apparently just earned his/her 5th age bit. When you're sixteen you don't necessarily have many things about which you can speak with authority, if you wish to do that. Your peers probably come closest.

(The fifth bit is the one that turns black and white into shades of grey. The sixth bit will bring colors. I don't know about the seventh bit yet.)

<comment><USER8> I think the seventh brings bitterness and resignation ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does HN really need another Facebook vs. Twitter submission? I don't think so.

<comment><USER11> You're right. However this post gives a little more than that - an insight into social media as percieved by millenials from one of their own. Nothing new, but not entirely irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this only true of teenagers? Seems like the argument applied to most people. My parents don't tweet for pretty much the same reasons, for example.

</comment><comment><USER13> Twitter is more "public" than Facebook, and so serves a different purpose. Teenagers become adults.

<comment><USER10> Not if you protect your tweets.

<comment><USER14> At which point they pretty much serve no purpose.

<comment><USER10> But the OP was complaining that public tweets serve no purpose. That's one of the reasons he prefers Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Restated, the author's argument is as follows:

\-- Twitter is a subset of Facebook for the purpose of communicating with real life friends. Facebook does the job better, too.

\-- For other purposes, Twitter gains in value, but not a lot.

</comment><comment><USER16> My own experience is that 99% of tweets are spam, which means that it is hard to find credible people using it.

For example, in technology the few people that have something to say are lost in the flood of spammers. By the way, I don't think that using twitter as a ping service for sites such as HN is helping the matter.

In Facebook at least you can rely on your real life connections, so the level of signal/noise is much better.

<comment><USER17> "In Facebook at least you can rely on your real life connections, so the level of signal/noise is much better."

why don't you just only follow accounts on twitter that don't spam their followers? I agree that there is a lot of spam, but most of that shows up when you search for a trending topic/hashtag. Those trending topics usually get popular (obtaining 'trend' status) before the spammers take over.

<comment><USER16> Of course, that's what we do. But the problem is finding those people. Facebook provides a way to find your friends. A normal search on twitter will reveal 99% of spammers and 1% or real people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given that Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga are constant trending topics, it's safe to assume that teens do use twitter, lots of them.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Twitter is a platform built for inclusive broadcast (to everyone), and to teenagers it offers no obvious value._

The author does not seem to realise that the Protected tweets feature is an option that obviates those objections, and makes Twitter function in the "circle of friends" manner the author desires.

<comment><USER19> What do protected tweets do that a Facebook status update wouldn't? Public tweets have added value over Facebook statuses for some people, but I don't see where protected tweets would.

<comment><USER10> Nothing, but I was responding to the article stating that Twitter is for broadcasting whereas Facebook keeps updates from being public.

<comment><USER20> Defaults matter. Twitter is public by default and the whole ecosystem is based on this assumption, the private setting is just an afterthought. Sure, you can tweet privately, but then you lose most of the features, and I wouldn't rely on security of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These articles tilt me to no end. Who cares if teenagers don't tweet, really. My parent's don't like Kanye - so what. It certainly doesn't mean they won't ever tweet, if that's the underlying concern.

</comment><comment><USER22> Who cares? Teenagers don't have money.

<comment><USER23> A quick google search reveals this claim to be false: [http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/teen-market-to- su...](http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/teen-market-to- surpass-200-billion-by-2011-despite-population-decline-817/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I understand why teens might not tweet, but I thought this sentence was strange: "Teens' lives are entirely built around their actual friends. Quite simply, why would teenagers bother using Twitter when Facebook exists, and offers so much more?"

Since when have all of a teens' (or anyone's) Facebook "Friends" corresponded to real "Friends". Oh, I know some are, but really, most are not.</comment>