The Opposite of Fitts' Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html <comment><USER2> Another relevant example would be the voting arrows here on this site. I don't know about anyone else, but I have voted comments the wrong way on a number of occasions. Having some sort of obvious undo vote feature might be nice as well.

<comment><USER3> Are we using the same site right now? I see only "up" votes, so how could you possibly make the mistake of making a "down" vote?

<comment><USER4> I think you need 200 karma before you can start downvoting.

<comment><USER5> The target may shifts over time, as karma inflation goes its course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm-rf Another example is OS X's active screen corners.

If I set the upper right corner to something useful, like 'Beam me up Scotty', I have about a .5 probability of transporting back to the Enterprise when I really wanted to find a file.

Active corners are cool, but they make a couple other functions difficult to use.

<comment><USER6> When I set up an active screen corner action, I always go for the top-right corner first, because that's the corner my cursor is least likely to hit. I always bring up the spotlight menu with the keyboard, because there's nothing useful to do with it without moving my hands to keyboard anyways. Since search results can be picked using the arrow keys, there's no need to move your cursor away from the part of the screen that you're working in.

</comment></comment><comment> cool-RR For at least 10 years I've wanted to have a GUI version of this switch:

[http://awaregeek.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/10/panikknap.jp...](http://awaregeek.com/wp- content/uploads/2007/10/panikknap.jpg)

(This is the best picture I could find, ideally I'd want the switch to be facing the person.)

I think it'll be possible to do something like this in-browser, with an animation that shows the plastic cover opening.

<comment><USER7> One way to achieve that would be to make the user check a confirmation box before enabling the submit button. I've used this in a couple places and I've never seen it confuse anyone.

<comment><USER8> I was doing my taxes the other day and clicked a button to import some information. It automatically upgraded me from the free version of the tax software (which doesn't have that specific functionality) to the paid version -- no confirmation, no "are you sure?", no undo function.

Had I not been planning on upgrading to the paid version anyway, I'd have been really, really upset.

Compare this to, say, Amazon. In order to purchase something, I add it to my cart, and then go through a checkout process, which clearly details what I'm buying and lets me remove stuff from my cart. It's pretty dang hard to accidentally buy something on Amazon.

Having an "enable" checkbox or a post-click "are you sure you want to [clear description of what you clicked]?" confirmation are great ways to help users avoid accidentally deleting something they wanted to send, or sending something they wanted to save, or buying something they wanted to remove from their cart.

<comment><USER9> That problem with the tax software does not sound like something to be kept secret. What were you using?

<comment><USER8> H&R Block's online version.

The initial page actually did say that to import the info required an upgrade, but it was poorly worded, and the lack of a confirmation or undo option was frustrating. I put in a complaint to their customer service guys, who said that the only way to go back to the free version is to register a new account.

Like I said, had I not actually planned to upgrade to the paid version partway through the process, I'd have been extremely angry and probably gone to one of their competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not an "opposite" so much as another way of thinking about Fitts', but this is definitely important when designing interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER11> Those who use Outlook will probably agree that the "Reply All" button is just a bit too close to the "Reply" button.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hotmail does the same with "New | Delete | Junk"

My CMU webmail recently moved the Delete button to the middle of the button bar, as far away from other buttons as possible. It's practically impossible to misclick, unless you're clicking around with your eyes closed.

</comment><comment><USER13> >Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?

Why on earth would an application designer provide a non-recoverable way to delete everything in the first place?

<comment><USER14> Because you're leaving their hosted service and you don't want them to continue datamining your documents?

<comment><USER15> Having a "delete all my work" button and doing datamining are not mutually exclusive...

The "delete all my work" button might mean "make my stuff inaccessible for me and all normal users".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And the software equivalent of the switch cover, the confirmation dialog ...

(which, coming to think of it, works the opposite way - instead of "enable, activate", it's "activate, confirm")

</comment><comment><USER17> Picking on Google Mail is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. I use Gmail, and I like many of it's qualities, but it has a UI that seems to have been designed by a 9 year old boy on his first experiment. It's laughably random, or perhaps 'eccentric'.

<comment><USER18> Really? I've never seen a better webmail interface than Gmail's. Can you justify your claim by providing some of "it's" qualities that are so laughable?

<comment><USER10> I hate to get into a flamewar but 90% of the themes they are so proud of break basic usability guidelines: Too distracting, not enough contrast between read and unread items, ignoring color theory for the meaning of colors used in the interface, etc. Drives me crazy.

Edit: And as I posted to my Tumblr (<http://ajh.us/GmUI>) just 5 days ago:

> Today I opened a Gmail window. At the top of the screen, I saw a yellow > message beginning, "Hey, this is important! …" I never finished reading it > because I had clicked something else (a message) and the supposedly > important message disappeared, never to be seen again.

> So the Gmail team either

> 1\. Lied about the importance of the message, or

> 2\. Totally failed to make me actually read it.

> Not so impressive UI design.

<comment><USER19> I've seen 'Hey, this is important!' before: on a gmail account that had its password compromised. I seem to recall that it was 'you might be compromised, you should verify your secondary address for account recovery' You might want to check your Gmail usage log at the bottom of the window, check your secondary address, and change your password.

<comment><USER20> Oh, it's because they think the account is compromised? Huh. I've had that message a few times before, noted that yes, that is the recovery address I told them about and yes, it's wrong, but no, I won't update it just because it's been a while. If I had known they asked because they noticed I'd logged in from a new location, I would have updated the record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _I can tell what you're thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can't. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected._

If you ever wished you could undo that sent email, there's an "Undo Send" feature in Gmail Labs which you can enable.

<comment><USER14> It's not really relevant to the point he's trying to make but a simple low- tech hack is to write your message first, then put in the recipients email addresses.

With no email address, any accidental send will fail.

<comment><USER22> I include the email addresses but append ".invalid", which achives the same result.

<comment><USER23> I tell mutt to automatically sign + encrypt outgoing email. Since I so rarely send mail to people who have PGP keys, mutt almost always asks me to pick a recipient key before it'll send.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which companies you know about that have a great interview process? - <AUTHOR> There's a lot of talk recently about how tech interviews focus too much on stuff like whiteboard coding and tricky algorithmic questions. Not just FAANGs, but smaller companies are copying this model of interviewing as well.<p>To offer a counterpoint, I would like to know which companies you know about that have a good (or maybe not insane) interview process. I'm not interested in dedicating months of my life studying for tricky interview questions instead of doing real work and becoming a better developer. <comment><USER2> I think this can vary greatly even within the same company. Even if the process is the same, the person providing the subjective rating of the applicant can be radically different from interviewer to interviewer.

I've seen this in the internal posting processes of my company. Probably the most insane interview from a technical perspective was this one time that I was looking to change stacks, a day before my interview HR sent me an email saying it would be a code screening interview and that I should bring my laptop and use any language I wanted. When I got there the next day, the manager handed me a Mac (I'm not familiar with them) and told me that I would be using that and writing Angular code in Webstorm (a language I never used, in an editor I never used). I was given one hour to create a basic webpage containing a table with some data - 30 minutes for functionality, a check of my functionality, then 30 minutes for CSS. I managed to Google how to create an Angular project in Webstorm, a couple shortcut keys on Mac, and get about a quarter of the table built in 30 minutes. When the manager checked my progress he asked if I wanted to do the CSS part or go onto questions, so we did some questions. When he ask if I had any questions, I asked why he even selected me for a code screen if my resume didn't list any of the technologies and that I was switching stacks and expected more of a generic code screen like HR told me. His reply was that he expected me to be an "expert in the technology" (this was a midlevel interview). Needless to say, I did not get the job or the follow up interview.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recently interviewed for both Shopify and Hashicorp. Their technical assessment were clear, not tricky and allowed for any tools or documentation. The recruiters also explained what to expect at each stages and how to prepare. I didn't make it through either but it didn't leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have changed the job recently, and I did a few interviews. I enjoyed pair programming and code review that some of them did. Especially that this is something a software engineer, does daily as opposed to implementing complex algorithms, it felt more like I am being tested on skills that are required.

One of the companies, most interactive, did a bit of role-playing. Interviewers took on the roles of product owner and my teammate to help with code if needed. They provided a simple code base with REST API, and I had to implement new endpoint and later there was "change in requirements". I had to refactor the code a bit. Tasks were simple but stimulated a lot of conversations about how and why allowing to cover a wide range of concepts.

Two companies said "pair programming", but in reality, it was me writing code for tasks they wrote down for me without much interaction. Interviewers were mostly silently watching me with occasional nudge if they saw me struggle at some point. But still better than whiteboard :)

One company provided me with a task to solve, and I had a few minutes to read it and ask them questions if any. They left me for an hour to implement it. I don't think they expect anyone to 100% solve the tasks, but I'm sure it could be done in that time frame if you are fluent in tools best suited for it. After one hour, they came back, checked my progress, asked questions about decisions I made and followed up with a conversation on how I would continue and implement remaining parts.

Code review, I was presented with one page of code, nothing complex, but there were either some bugs or code had a questionable quality. We had a conversation about what I think should be changed and why.

I know you asked for company names but I think if you job hunting just ask for a details of the process on first contact. They usually provide it anyway and see if they do things you like and cut it short if they have some things you don't like. I just wanted to share that if the have pair programming and code review in the process they may have a good process.

</comment><comment><USER5> I interviewed with Ludeon, the company that makes Rimworld. The process was fair. It starts off with slow, light questions like on the game itself, general game design.

Technical interviews were lots of small questions like the definition of X, where X is something common, like threads or classes for example, or the difference between an array or list. Those aren't the exact questions, but it's not jargon, and if you used it, you would know. There were enough questions to sort of test if you were the type of person to look into improving yourself, but not so few questions that it unfairly judges you for missing a few.

The algorithm one was really good. Instead of something generic like pathfinding, it covered how to solve an actual problem that they faced.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work for a giant corporation and every team is free to interview candidates however they want (after they get past HR screening, which is simple): the (to-be) direct manager of the person is responsible for everything, and generally they make the most senior members of the team do technical interviews, while they do the non-technical part. So your experience will _greatly_ vary.

</comment><comment><USER7> I interviewed with Helpshift last year and it was a good experience, they did have a take home task but it was very interesting and kind of fun to implement.

The onsite interviews ranged from solving real world problems to optimising data structures.

The interviews also seemed more like open discussions which I rather liked.

</comment><comment><USER8> I went through the Netflix process and even though it was lengthy it was pretty good IMO. No crazy questions and a good balance between technical and behavioral questions. I'm aware it varies a lot between teams but it looks like they are trying to have a basic structure at least.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stripe's interview process was really enjoyable. Professional and was relevant to the role.</comment>


Ask HN – Who does your hosting? - <AUTHOR>

Title says it all: who does your hosting? <comment><USER2> If you're looking for recommendations and opinions, I would shamelessly recommend taking a look at the data I collect. I track many of the big hosting companies and what people are saying about them.

[http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare/](http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare/)

</comment><comment><USER3> DigitalOcean - [https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=4d7fb2079a96](https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=4d7fb2079a96)

<comment><USER4> Nice referral link you got here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bytemark for 99% of things (now all on bigv.io, their cloud platform) and single machine for backup MX/DNS etc. at DigitalOcean

<comment><USER6> Seconded - although I'm a little biased ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://ninefold.com/](http://ninefold.com/) (Rails Hosting)

</comment><comment><USER8> WebFaction

</comment><comment><USER9> The Planet, which merged with SoftLayer, which is now owned by IBM.

</comment><comment><USER10> DigitalOcean currently, previously A Small Orange.

</comment><comment><USER11> 000webhost.com

<comment><USER12> I had started out with their free plan for a few of the smaller websites I maintain. But their limitations (facebook api) and downtimes discouraged me from upgrading to their paid plans. Eventually, I moved those sites back to one of my DO boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> DigitalOcean

</comment><comment><USER14> AppHarbor.

</comment><comment><USER15> BudgetVM. The price is right. I have had a couple of downs over the past two years. One was several hours. Not for mission critical 100% up time cases. But great for casual sites/ web apps. Did I mention the price is right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I ask because of down time at CloudAtCost, some people's servers have been down 10+ days now. Mine's been down for three so far.

<comment><USER15> They haven't been bad at all. I have had maybe 5 instances with them over the past two years and have 3 now. The speed is good in Dallas, not so good on the one instance I had in LA. I have one important VM for clients (have complained a few times over the past couple of years). They appear to know which one this is and have it on a fast node. It hasn't been down except reboots in nearly a year.

I'm happy with their customer service and response times also. But probably I wouldn't use them for high level mission critical stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> wpengine/digitalocean

</comment><comment><USER17> Rackspace

</comment><comment><USER18> Linode

</comment><comment><USER19> Linode</comment>


Kim Dotcom Stops Xbox and Playstation Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-stops-xbox-and-playstation-attacks-141226/ <comment><USER2> So, any group of kids with access to one-click DDOS tools can extort $300,000USD worth of services out of a business by attacking large networks?

Is Kim really that proud of this precedent?

Will a $300k ransom be enough next time?

Maybe that's the future of high uptime public networks, an understanding that millions or even tens of millions per year must be set aside for bribes.

Sounds a bit like driving through a corrupt country where one must keep bribes on hand at all times to ensure non-molested travel.

<comment><USER3> "can extort $300,000USD worth of services out of a business"

That's not the value. It's probably going to cost around 50k to 100k

I certainly don't agree with the precedent, though

<comment><USER2> Value is complicated but "cost" alone isn't the full picture.

Question: how did you calculate the cost of a _lifetime_ membership to something? I'd be curious to see the numbers.

Either way, most tax systems allow the full cost + 1/2 of the difference between cost and fair market value as a tax deduction (the US does it that way, I bet other anglo-derived systems like Australia is similar), which changes the math a little too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This kind of stuff is really upsetting. If you don't want people to do this kind of thing, you have to not encourage them. Even if they are all arrested, others will see this. And think, Hey I can get a reward for doing this stuff.

A 10 sec look at their twitter feed will tell you that they are doing this primarily to make a name for themselves. They want to be famous.

Yet what does every single news outlet do? Plaster their groups name all over every story. Even the BBC goes to mention them by name. Which is only going to encourage this behavior.

<comment><USER5> >Yet what does every single news outlet do?

What they're supposed to? This is after all, news. You don't drop a story because you think someone is a cunt.

<comment><USER4> You report it, as news, saying "a hacker group". You don't have to report the name of the group. There's something called "Journalism ethics and standards", that includes stuff like not reporting a victim's name or in a lot of cases not broadcasting the videos terrorist groups send out.

You want to see something scary, start to look at how media coverage affects mass shootings. There is very strong evidence to support the idea that our current media coverage of making these people "famous" increases the deadliness of these events as compared to something like the North Hollywood Shootout.

<comment><USER6> I rather disagree--it's already basically trivial to fabricate as much news as we want; removing the burden of proof and specific naming makes it almost impossible to fact-check anything (and even then, in the pathological case, details can be made up, but I digress).

Allowing agencies to not report details that can be independently verified makes for worse news and better propeganda.

<comment><USER4> So you're saying that The Washington Post shouldn't have reported on Watergate, with Deep Throat? If you can't trust the people providing the news, then citing sources doesn't change that fact. This is why you have collaborating sources, this is why you vet stories, and this is why you build trust with your readers. They could have linked to their source, and still not NAMED the group. Its the name that gets added to google search, not the sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The attacks against the Playstation Network have slowed, but PSN is still offline in the US.

I'm curious about the nature of these attacks. Are they using sheer network traffic or are they tying up the authentication servers with bogus requests? Has anyone seen a good technical description of what's happening?

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like Mega requires an email address for account creation (and activation?). I'm sure many of these folks will be using disposable accounts, but some of them will probably use an email address that can be traced back, particularly if they're thinking in terms of keeping a lifetime account.

Seems to me that the list of email addresses associated with the 3000 lifetime account activations would be fair game for civil or criminal subpoenas.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any reason to believe this wasnt for publicity and to get his message about diplomacy out? He definitely has the resources to do this.

<comment><USER10> I will allow for a slight chance that he really did sincerely just want to play Xbox/Playstation yesterday.

<comment><USER11> I think it's pretty likely. Kim is one of the top Call of Duty players in the world for Xbox, and is known to be a very avid gamer.

The publicity sure doesn't hurt, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On one hand I don't like the idea of surrendering to criminals, especially when you're giving them some kind of compensation, but on the other hand it's likely most or all of them will be arrested in the not-so-distant future. It's probably a net benefit if you appease them in the short term so they can cause as little damage as possible before they end up going away for good.

<comment><USER5> >but on the other hand it's likely most or all of them will be arrested in the not-so-distant future

People have been saying this for 3-4 months now.

<comment><USER11> Take a look at the following Twitter: [https://twitter.com/finestsquad](https://twitter.com/finestsquad)

At least one of them, a 17-year-old from Canada, has already been arrested.

The personal information of most of the rest of the group has already been publicly spread by "Finest Squad" and sent to law enforcement (though I imagine law enforcement probably already knows who most of them are, especially if other random Internet users can find their names and addresses so easily).

At that point it's just a matter of monitoring and building up a strong enough case.

<comment><USER5> What's there to back up the legitimacy of the information released by these guys?

It just looks like they're tweeting out random IPs from zeustracker.

<comment><USER11> If you're familiar with some of the script kiddie communities these people hang out in, it's not that hard to check their work.

It's quite possible they got a few wrong; I have not independently confirmed the information and I'm not sure anyone else has. One can clearly tell what sort of individuals the perpetrators are, though, and US law enforcement typically does not have a lot of trouble identifying and rounding up egotistical script kiddies. Look at LulzSec and all the copycats.

Feel free to put my comment on a calendar: I'd bet a fair bit of money that 75% or more of the group will be arrested before Christmas of 2015.

<comment><USER5> All "finestsquad" seems to have done is doxed various people the lizardsquad twitter has followed over time, I doubt they're stupid enough to follow themselves.

<comment><USER11> That is not what they have done at all.

These aliases and information are present on channels far away from Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given Kim his past there is no reason to not believe he is not behind this by either 1) seeding it for publicity or 2) working with law enforcement (those accounts will be used/sold once).

</comment><comment><USER13> There are reports of people still having difficulties accessing PSN. I don't know if Sony's network needs more time to recover or what the deal is at this point.

<comment><USER14> What's to keep _another_ group from firing off a second DDOS and letting the Lizard group take the blame for it?

Now Dotcom can pull his goodies back while the Lizards have to (somehow) publicly prove they weren't going back on their deal.

From the bleachers, this looks like a lot of fun actually.

<comment><USER13> I think it's unlikely that there are many more untraceable über hackers out there with the resources to take down the gaming networks.

<comment><USER14> I thought these days you could pretty much purchase a DDOS on the open market from the botnet owners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

      But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

      You never get rid of the Dane.

</comment><comment><USER16> Haters gonna hate, but I think it was a cool thing Kim Dotcom did. I think it's time to put my Mega account to use.</comment>


Steganography - Camouflage for your encryption - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

<comment><USER2> Explanation with graphs and pictures [http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march12012/index.html](http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/march12012/index.html)</comment>


Mahindra's $1M Bounty Awaits Innovators - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Mahindras-1m-bounty-awaits-desi-innovators/articleshow/31062876.cms

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fist of its kind thing in India and will definitely encourage people to build something useful. But I am not sure how far the 'driverless car' can be developed under this program.</comment>


CMU machine learning protesters at G20 - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/30686429@N07/sets/72157622330082619/

<comment><USER2> Typical hackers - hardly any of them saw the value of using a real designer for those protest signs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one who misparsed the title as referring to a machine that is learning?

Are those slogans or jokes?

"Bayesians against discrimination!"

"Our sets, our axiom of choice."</comment>


The growing evidence on Vitamin D and Covid - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-growing-evidence-on-vitamin-d-and-covid <comment><USER2> The only paper I see referenced talking about the vitamin D-COVID link is [0]. It doesn't look too polished, and the methodology seems a bit lacking - I'm not a professional though, so if someone is please correct me. Assuming the paper is solid, it is one study on <5000 people, where only 499 even had information about their vitamin D levels.

The article itself only really talks about this connection in a single paragraph, the rest of it dedicated to general issues around vitamin D deficiencies - I don't personally know how big a problem this actually is, but the fact that 1 small paper said it helps with COVID isn't a reason for it to now be "shouted from the rooftops".

In the sentence following this advice, a different (published) paper is referenced [1]: "A new article by a long list of medical experts in the BMJ cautiously _agrees_ ", but as they then quote, the only result that paper gives in reference to COVID is that stay-at-home orders may increase vitamin D deficiencies. Though not outright malicious, to me it read like the article was trying to gain credibility by quoting a published paper which talks about vitamin D and COVID together, even if unrelated to a possible vitamin D-COVID connection. Though this might just be me.

Either way, I don't see this "growing evidence" from the article - if it was titled different, and only mentioned [0] in passing (but even better, not at all), I'd have less of a problem with it, but it's implying that a link between vitamin D deficiency and COVID is there and is significant, when both these things are pretty much still unknown.

[0] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.20095893v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.08.20095893v1.full.pdf)

[1] [https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2020/05/13/bm...](https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2020/05/13/bmjnph-2020-000089.full.pdf)</comment>


GameBoy Advance emulator for iOS, no jailbreak required - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rileytestut/GBA4iOS <comment><USER2> I'd never seen MacBuildServer.com until just now but they completely violate the terms of service with Apple. They are using their enterprise development certificate to bypass the AppStore. They won't be around long.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how they deal with the possibility that a github xcode project build file can run arbitrary code... What if someone submits a project to build that spawns a reverse shell and then trojanizes the build server for later builds? I wouldn't trust any ipa coming out of that machine.

<comment><USER4> There are a number of options. For instance, each build could run on a freshly provisioned virtual machine (like Travis CI), or using a carefully crafted sandbox-exec setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its always amazed me that Nintendo hasn't cashed in yet on creating an official emulator for iPhone/Andriod and releasing thier huge collection of old games in an official marketplace for people to download.... there is no doubt how popular that would be. Everyone would be playing pokemon again.

<comment><USER6> Ignoring the obvious legal issues of 3rd party games, Nintendo seems to strongly believe that it's back catalog is worth quite a bit of money and seems to steadfastly against doing anything that may devalue it. They seem to prefer to sell 5k copies of an old game at $5-10 each than 200k copies at $2 on a platform they don't control.

It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues. I'm sure there are many cases where X was sold to Y which may or may not have been sold to Z who went out of business. I bet there are great games that would be in legal limbo if someone decided to try to publish them again.

<comment><USER7> >It's too bad so many of the games of the NES or SNES era could probably never be republished due to rights issues.

Or is it? Those games are at most a few megs in size, which means that one can download the library of all SNES games ever made in a few dozen minutes; additionally, emulators are "fairly easy" to implement on new platforms.

This alone guarantees that 30 years from now people are likely to be playing SNES/GBA/NES/etc. games on their hardware of choice. I wouldn't make the same bet about subsequent platforms (like Game Cube, PS2, Xbox, etc.) given a) the bigger size of game files and b) how much harder it is to emulate those platforms.

So those old school games are safe in the distributed hands of the underground emulation community; we don't need publishers here :)

<comment><USER8> I guess you haven't heard about what happened to bitgamer have you? So far, a suitable replacement hasn't surfaced and it's going to take many years to build up a library again, if it happens at all. Don't kid yourself, they are winning. It's getting harder and harder to find good clean hosts for roms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty cool idea, the no jailbreak thing, while true, is a bit disingenuous though, since you need your own developer account.

What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app? Surely it's against their TOS?

<comment><USER10> "What are the chances that Apple would just revoke all the keys used to build this app?"

I'm going to guess the chances are near zero. Picture the lurking possibility that Apple revokes your developer key, essentially shutting down your business, because you merely built something on your own hardware that they didn't like. You didn't distribute it, the code never left your network, you just built it. I feel that every argument for "developers will never leave iOS even if Apple does..." goes out the window at that point.

<comment><USER11> MacBuildServer is distributing the .ipa files they have inhouse signed to anyone that wants it. Apple would only revoke the certs used to sign apps that are distributed outside that assigned enterprise.

<comment><USER10> Okay, _that_ I could see happening, and I wouldn't have much of a problem with it (abusing the enterprise keys and all). Perhaps I misread, as I took it to be asking about the general case of any dev who downloads source and clicks "Product/Run".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There seems to be a SNES version as well by the same author. Really amazing the community around this.

[https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS](https://github.com/rileytestut/SNES4iOS)

</comment><comment><USER13> Without external controller support (and hardware) these projects are all just proof of concept. That is, in this case you're still better of with an Android device and a controller via OTG/BT.

<comment><USER14> iOS 7 is getting official external game controller APIs:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameCo...](https://developer.apple.com/library/etc/redirect/WWDR/GameControllerPG)

So there's a future for that.

<comment><USER15> You could also use an iCade or some other controller that uses the iCade protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really cool. I found that the game music was a little laggy/skippy while playing Pokemon Sapphire, but that's really no issue for me.

<comment><USER17> Same while trying out FF6. Also the graphics would sometimes be slow to redraw (ex: during cutscenes).

Overall I love what this team has done, playing these old games on my phono feels downright like magic. It's a shame that Nintendo won't bring these games officially to mobile platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't it illegal to spread any Gameboy BIOS image?

<comment><USER19> The GBA doesn't have a BIOS; you're thinking of ROMs (effectively, the cartridge contents dumped to a file). ROMs are covered by copyright, and are indeed illegal to distribute without authorized consent (which Nintendo would never give). However, there are homebrew ROMs you can legally download and distribute. No emulator I know of, including this one, illegally ships with (or describes how to illegally obtain) copyright-protected ROMs.

<comment><USER20> The GBA does in fact have a bios, but modern emulators do not require it except for some rare edge cases that their reverse engineered bios can't handle.

<comment><USER21> Can you provide any info on this? I'd like to know more, it sounds interesting.

<comment><USER18> [http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm](http://nocash.emubase.de/gbabios.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why would anyone want to play those games with such poor controls? The person who made this does obviously not like games, but coding, which is fair enough.

<comment><USER23> Lighten up, man. You don't need to shit on everything just for the sake of shitting on it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are quadcopters not flown like helicopters yet? - <AUTHOR>

Not RC quadcopters, but actual size ones, which carry people. Are they even being built? Would they not be more stable?<p>Edit: found this. http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1708654 <comment><USER2> There are a lot of reasons, but one that comes to mind is that quadcopters can't autorotate. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_(helicopter)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_\(helicopter\))

Also batteries suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! How would the batteries of an helicopter and quadcopter differ?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also on StackOverflow: [http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why- havent-...](http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/3300/why-havent- quadcopters-been-scaled-up-yet/3305?noredirect=1#3305)

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding has it one issue is that a lot of the control-system benefits of the tiny quadcopter go away when you scale up and the blades have actual mass (so changing their speed is hard).</comment>


Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-come <comment><USER3> My favorite story of Jonny Ive happened in the summer of 2008. At the time I was in the student internship program at Apple, and as part of the program each of the executives at Apple would sit down in Town Hall for a chat with that year's group of interns. Some of the executives would come with a slide deck briefly explaining what they did, something about the company, etc. Johnny just came in, sat on a stool in the middle of the stage, said "What would you like to know?", and started taking questions.

About 20 minutes in to the conversation, one student asked him: "Why are so many of Apple's products white?" I think all of us expected some long explication of the clean and unassuming quality of white as a color.

Instead, Johnny closed his eyes, took a breath, and said (as best as I can recall), "Imagine something that doesn't exist. Imagine something completely new. A new shape. A new device..." After a beat he continued, "Can you imagine something like that?" At this point he was obviously doing the very thing he was suggesting we all try. Then he opened his eyes and plainly said, "Well...when I do they're always white!" Then he laughed like a little kid and said, "I guess that sounds pretty ridiculous, huh?" and moved on to the next question...

<comment><USER4> It always strikes me how things that other companies obsess over and create entire vocabularies for (we don't sell products, we sell experiences!) and experiment with obsessively come so naturaly to Apple. Other companies produce hundreds of tweaked and targetted models of things in dozens of colours and patterns that are produced by different market oriented product groups and focus-tested to death.

Apple makes two products in the same category and they're both white, and they're white not because marketing, esperiences, focus groups or demographics but becuase Johny thinks it feels right for new things to be that way. Every 3-5 years or so they produce them in 5 different vivid primary colours, just for fun.

Conversely Apple absolutely obsesses at the executive level over and exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and fluidity of a scrolling action and bounce animation, even just exactly the correct shade of yellow in an icon (real example). Things most companies would assign to a random intern and then forget about.

<comment><USER5> > exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact > minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and > fluidity...

This is a myth. The iOS maps debacle is just one example.

<comment><USER6> If I'm not mistaken the "debacle" had to do much more with the underlying data rather than the actual UI or design of the application.

And it might be just one example, but for some reason when speaking of "Apple f..k ups" it's often the only one that comes up in discussions (at least in recent times)... I would say that it's a pretty impressive record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's really one clear goal behind this: building Ive's image as a design genius, responsible for the major decisions behind Apple's products, in the same way Jobs's image was created. Why ? because it creates a unique image for Apple's products - the products of genius, which really helps positioning them as luxury brands.This is a common technique with many luxury brands.

But it's most likely a false image.Most likely Apple 's products design is due to the talent of many designers within it's halls,the unique culture within, and their intense attention to detail.

<comment><USER8> Yes, you nailed it. They know Tim Cook can't carry the brand as a detail obsessed designer so they need Ive to do so instead.

The problem is, does it work? I got a few impressions from the article, beyond "Jony Ive is a really nice guy" which everyone seems to agree on.

One: all his experience is in hardware. All of it. He wasn't given any responsibility over software design when Jobs was in charge at all. This leads to the question of why, given their closeness .... I suspect it's because Jobs knew that Ive is really an industrial hardware designer and the skills needed to do great software design are different.

Two: he comes across as kind of burned out. He's spent years designing a relatively small number of products, most of which are (as the article points out) basically just variants on the same "slab of glass with a button" idea. Can he really feel like he's fully exercising his design muscles in such an environment? The article says several times he's sort of wanted to leave and go off and do other things like luxury products several times, but feels he can't go now because so many Apple employees depend on him.

Another thing is that the Apple (hardware) design team seems to be a lot smaller than I expected. They have three recruiters and hire one designer _per year_? Seriously? I've seen picky hiring before at Google but one hire per year given three full time recruiters is crazy. This is meant to impress upon us how incredibly elite and discerning Ive is. I read something else in it: they are all friends who trust each other, and quite simply don't like hiring. They are expected to do it by the company but would much prefer not to.

It also leads me to think they are having problems. The iPod and iPhone were huge successes, partly because none of the competitors in those spaces cared much about industrial design. In some areas (in-car systems?) that's still the case. But increasingly Apple has been competing with Google and the big Asian firms for consumer electronics, and there they have been losing their edge.

They started talking about the Apple watch in 2011. In 2015 it's still not on the market. Meanwhile the Android team and their hardware partners have launched several watches, of which the round Moto 360 has been attracting the most attention (disclosure: I got one for Christmas, it's neat). But despite a 50+ page article, the journalist lets Jony Ive dismiss round watches in the span of a single sentence. Apparently they just "don't make sense" because smart watches are using "for lists". Except that they do make sense and the one I have works pretty well.

I got the strong impression from reading this that the design team at Apple is small, insular, ignores their competition completely, doesn't want to scale up and doesn't feel any real sense of urgency. For example, they work long hours but many of those hours were spent making dozens of slightly different sized models so they could rediscover the insight that people wanted larger smartphone screens. Something that all the other smartphone makers had already realised ages ago, designed and shipped. Surely they could have reduced their time to market by simply spending some time with their competitors products instead?

<comment><USER9> All your arguments would carry more weight if Apple had released more failures and its competitors more successes in the recent past. Which seems (at least to me) not the case.

<comment><USER8> Apple has released a tiny number of products that sell extremely well and are very profitable, in Japan and English-speaking markets (USA, UK, Australia, etc).

Their competitors have released more products that cater to a wider range of people, and dominate the market elsewhere. In most European markets for example iPhone sits at around 10% market share. It spikes when they release a new version of the iPhone once a year then quickly settles back down again.

So it depends how you define success. Apple could be successful for a long time in the same way Microsoft were successful for the last 15 years - <USER2> being highly profitable and cranking out new versions of their flagship products, whilst releasing very few new notable hits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apparently, Ive helps design lightsabres now too:

> And Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, > and made what Abrams recalled as "very specific" suggestions about the > design of lightsabres. Abrams told me that "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" > would reflect those thoughts, but he wouldn't say how. After the release of > the film's first trailer—which featured a fiery new lightsabre, with a cross > guard, and a resemblance to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his > contribution. "It was just a conversation," he said, then explained that, > although he'd said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for > unevenness: "I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and > just a little bit more spitty." A redesigned weapon could be "more analog > and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous."

Kinda cool, though no doubt this will be result in some more pointless controversy. I thought this was also revealing:

> He [Abrams] later told me that Ive had shared some of the company's news in > advance, and that they had discussed "the fact that we were both working on > things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was > _preposterous_."

<comment><USER11> "less precise, and just a little bit more spitty" I initially took that to be in reference to the handle, but the trailer clearly shows blades that appear to be almost made of flame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR via Article Summariser (Chrome extension):

Ive is uncomfortable knowing that a hundred thousand Apple employees rely on his decision-making-his taste-and that a sudden announcement of his retirement would ambush Apple shareholders.

The Apple Watch-the first Apple device with a design history older than its founder, or its designer-was conceived "Close to Steve's death," Ive said.

John Gruber, an influential Apple blogger, has written that the prices may be "Shockingly high ... from the perspective of the tech industry," but perhaps "Disruptively low from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world." Sebastian Vivas, the director of a watch museum maintained by Audemars Piguet, the Swiss manufacturer, recently described his industry as unperturbed by Apple's plans: "We're not afraid; we're just a little bit smiling." It would be a greater threat, he told me, if men widely accepted that they could wear gemstones without a time-keeping pretext.

Ive has begun to work with Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign-as yet unannounced-of the Apple Stores.

<comment><USER13> That's a criminal disservice to some incredibly insightful writing.

<comment><USER7> Care to write a better summary ? I'm sure many would be interested and upvote.

<comment><USER14> Read it. It's an awesome piece.

<comment><USER15> Personally, I find the brand of his sunglasses and the cut of his pants to be irrelevant. They may help paint a picture of the man ( _if_ you're familiar with the brand names or the latest styles), but for the most part they are a part of the narrative I could do without. I'm not reading a novel where I must paint my own picture of the characters, I'm reading a news article related to tech. A picture would have sufficed.

Long form narrative requires long form attention and a decent chunk of time. This piece is competing against 29 others on the front page of HN (and another 10-15 which hit the front page and subsequently fell off since I last logged on), and I prefer a concise summary to see if there's information I want or need from this article.

<comment><USER16> References to the sunglasses brands and the style of objects with which Ive surrounds himself are part of the message the reporter is trying to get across about the relationship between Apple and luxury brands - a story which, as Apple positions themselves to try to replace Cartier and Rolex on celebrity wrists (because those endorsements are critical to Apple avoiding creating a 'geek watch'), places Ive's role in intriguing light. The question, for me, is how much of that is the reporter emphasizing that because they themselves find the relationship interesting - and how much is that Apple's spin to try to reassure the bling-centric part of the watch market that Ive really does understand luxury brands.

As someone who finds all the airport-mall-style silk, perfume and diamond brands completely baffling, Apple's move in that direction - from design to designer - is a little concerning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought the bit on cars was timely:

> Ive acknowledged that he and Marc Newson, who recently joined Apple as a > London-based employee, could "incite ourselves to a sort of fever pitch" of > design distress; they'll complain about things "developed to a schedule, to > a cost," or "developed to be different, not better." He and Newson are car > guys, and they feel disappointed with most modern cars; each summer, they > attend the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where vintage sports cars are > exhibited and raced in the South of England. "There are some shocking cars > on the road," Ive said. "One person's car is another person's scenery." To > his right was a silver sedan with a jutting lower lip. Ive said, quietly, > "For example." As the disgraced car fell behind, I asked Ive to critique its > design: "It is baffling, isn't it? It's just nothing, isn't it? It's just > insipid." He declined to name the model, muttering, "I don't know, I don't > want to offend." (Toyota Echo.)

<comment><USER18> I'm willing to guess that the word in the notebook wasn't 'Airbug' either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Behind Ive, at a distance that suggested self-exile, was Steve Wozniak, who, > in 1976, co-founded Apple with Jobs, and who was wearing a black steam-punk > watch the size of an ashtray. ("What is that?" Ive later asked, > rhetorically, in mock affront at its design.)

Well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2gy53vVRNs) , the binary watch is a silvery-metal colour and not as big as the Nixie watch, so it's probably the Nixie watch [http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/](http://www.cathodecorner.com/nixiewatch/) . (But _of course_ you knew that. ;) )

<comment> m-i-l The one he was showing to the BBC yesterday was the Nixie tube one: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31463351)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Jobs's taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years > ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, "Why would > you be vague?," arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: "You don't > care about how they feel! You're being vain, you want them to like you."

Sociopathy in a nutshell.

I've seen this line of thought in a few places in popular culture. It's toxic. Caring about other people's feelings can be authentic.

<comment><USER20> Keep in mind that the unspoken context in the preceding paragraph illustrates Ive's tact in passing criticism through a metaphor rather than the Jobsian, "this sucks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "J. J. Abrams, the filmmaker and showrunner, is a friend of Ive's, but he could not attend the September launch, because he was shooting "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," in London. He later told me that Ive had shared some of the company's news in advance, and that they had discussed "the fact that we were both working on things that had a level of expectation and anticipation that was preposterous."

Am I the only one that thought that sounds a lot like you just gave away material, non-public info to someone who could have easily acted on it? Probably nothing beyond what was in the rumor bin, but still.

<comment><USER22> Having non-public information is not criminal. Only trading on it is.

<comment><USER23> It's not even criminal to possess material, non-public information and trade on it. It's only illegal (at least in the United States) if the insider gives you the information in exchange for some tangible benefit, and then you trade on it.

<comment><USER21> Yes, that is true - however, it is generally frowned on by public companies to admit you shared such information outside the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a software developer I am of course biased but I feel like Ive wielding so much control without a strong technical counterpart is a mistake. The first evidence of this in my mind was the iPhone 5C - a cute shell around 1 year old technology. It's too early to tell but I feel like the Apple Watch has similarities - cute designs and features without compelling utility or really any sort of technical innovation, which is surprising. You also see this in the lack of focus on stable software throughout Apple's ecosystem which I honestly think has gotten a lot worse in the past year. I can appreciate what Apple has done for industrial design, user interfaces, and heck even in packaging, but there is a tipping point.

<comment><USER25> What exactly do you think is the mistake in the iPhone 5C? Does every new product have to be technologically more advanced than the one before? Market segmentation by introducing lower-cost models is nothing new.

Also no technical innovation: iMac, iPod, etc.

<comment><USER24> "Market segmentation by introducing lower-cost models is nothing new."

That's not how Apple became the most profitable company in the world. The first thing Jobs did when he returned to Apple was cut out all of the excess product lines.

<comment><USER26> I guess you're not being sarcastic. The iPhone was perhaps the _only_ line without a entry-level component: the plethora of iMacs, iPods, and iBooks each had expensive/professional and entry/cheap lines, if not more than two.

And even then, Apple typically left the previous iPhone model around at a discount so price-sensitive consumers could buy a discounted 4S instead of a cutting-edge 5, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Things are "developed to be different, not better."

This is certainly true for the Apple keyboard. It is totally an-organic. Give me a cheap standard Logitec keyboard over an Apple keyboard anytime.

<comment><USER28> Let's be clear here -- I'm the first to admit Apple haven't made a mouse worth using in the last ten years. All their mice in the post-ball era have been mediocre or miserable. (I currently use a DeathAdder 2013.)

But their full size corded keyboard is brilliant. Haven't used anything that feels half as good. Haven't seen anything that looks half as good.

Oh, and their trackpads are brilliant too.

<comment><USER29> Maybe I'm weird here, but I think the Magic Mouse is really great and comfortable to use.

<comment><USER30> I love my magic mouse as well. I wish they made a corded one though, or made bluetooth stuff more reliable.

<comment><USER29> One silly thing in OS X is that if you have only a wireless keyboard and mouse, and accidentally turn off Bluetooth, it is really difficult to figure out what to do next. The usual advice is "attach a wired mouse and keyboard and turn it back on", but if you don't have one, lots of luck.

You can actually recover from this with a full power down and restart, OS X tries to detect this condition and turn Bluetooth back on. But sometimes it doesn't work and requires a PRAM reset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands The Wired article which was referenced in the beginning of the article:

The cover: [http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray- cover.p...](http://hypercritical.co/2013/09/02/images/wired-pray-cover.png)

The article - "101 Ways to Save Apple" : [http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html)

The list is pretty interesting we can look back and see which ones were spot on and the others were way, way off.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love this piece. What a fantastic work.

I love that it's much longer than most articles shared on HN, and that reading the whole thing took me a long time, but was totally rewarding. A whole day of coffee breaks, in fact.

And now I'm too late to join in the discussion!

More high quality articles like this, please internets!

</comment><comment><USER32> "His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated." \- I don't really know what that phrase means, but I love it.

<comment><USER33> I would imagine something along the lines of - After you have been right so many times (and profitably so), people stop challenging you and just take your word as gospel. At that point, there is no longer a burden to convince people, which is a very helpful mechanism to keep you on your toes.

This mechanism is what you then have to internalize and have out with yourself (and perhaps the very few people you have to work insanely hard on to keep out of acolyte mode) because it is now the only thing in the world that even _can_ keep you on your toes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> _The cloth covering the table nearest the door was curiously flat. "This is actually complicated," Ive said, feeling through the material. "This will make sense later. I'm not messing with you at all, I promise."_

This sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel.

<comment><USER35> it was the watch display case the author talks about later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have no idea why they are giving this article away for free (loaded it into Instapaper and won't see ads).

Who wouldn't pay $3 for this via Stripe?

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't pay $0.10 for it.

<comment><USER36> You spend 60 minutes on something that isn't worth $0.10 for you?

<comment><USER37> No, I didn't spend time on it at all. Apple does not interest me.

<comment><USER13> Which explains why you are here, commenting on an article about Apple's lead designer.

<comment><USER37> I structurally read most comment threads on HN, _even on subjects that I don 't care about_ to see what's going on in the world of software and hardware without having to go and work with each and every device and piece of software out there.

Part of my job is to stay informed about lots of things that I don't have direct experience with, there is simply too much out there for any individual to experience directly.

So I use HN as a time-saving device, the collective wisdom and time invested vastly exceeds my own and it's not rare at all to find that HN comment threads are more informative and correct than the articles themselves. FWIW if a subject does interest me I'll read the article too (obviously...), and plenty of times the HN comment threads make me change my mind about what I should be interested in.

The effect of this is that I can state with some certainty _why_ apple does not interest me without investing a chunk of cash and a large amount of time first.

Of course that wasn't what you were after, you'd like me to admit that I'm secretly interested in apple after all. But there isn't a single apple product that I'd like to own or use (I have an ancient Imac here that's been off for more than a year now), I don't want to buy an 'experience', I only believe in being able to run whatever software I want on the hardware that I own. As soon as I need to jailbreak a device in order to be able to really use it you can safely count me out and OS/X is not such a large step up from Ubuntu that it makes me want to run a different OS on my desktop than on my servers.

So as far as I'm concerned Apple is not (currently) interesting to me.

<comment><USER38> None of that screed explains why you felt compelled to threadshit with "not worth 10¢ to me". You are able to "structurally read" to see what's going on without such comments, surely.

<comment><USER37> Because the GGGP asked 'who wouldn't pay $3 for this'.

<comment><USER38> I think it's implicit in the premise that only people who are interested in the topic would be prepared to pay anything to read something on it.

The charitable interpretation of his question would be "who, of the people who find this topic interesting, would not be willing to pay $3 for it?".

The question you are presumably structurally answering is "why wouldn't absolutely everybody in the whole world pay $3 for this?". In answering that, you were either being insulting to GGGP, or looking for a pretext to wedge in an "I don't care about this" comment. I suspect the latter.

<comment><USER39> Apple is a fascinating phenomenon. It rightly interests everyone; investors, economists, managers, consumers, and from the look of this thread, even those who it doesn't interest. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A fun bit is the defence of the hockey puck mouse (at the end).

</comment><comment><USER41> I'll be honest I couldn't finish this article. I am so sick of writers fawning over Steve Jobs in every single article about Apple. Jobs has been gone for over 3 years now. It's time that he was only mentioned in passing in an article about Apple's future.

<comment><USER42> I would not say the author was fawning, but it is obvious, and such articles try to explain that exact detail, that Jobs was and still is an immense influence. Writers need to – at least – acknowledge that, even if some people are tired of it.

<comment><USER41> Of course he's a huge influence. But it's been 3 years of everyone who talks about Apple talking about what a huge influence he is. It really does not need to be mentioned other than in passing any more. This article spent way too much tiem on it right away, to the point where I only made it through the first section and had to stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Am I the only one who thinks Jony Ive is a fraud? Let's examine the evidence, shall we?

Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can't remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."

And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.

Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr. That the 5c hasn't done well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.

Of late Apple has done phenomenally well, financially. But this isn't because of Jony Ive's design. It is because of the ecosystem created by Steve Jobs. The larger phone size met an important demand, and is not an innovation, and this is not repeatable innovation.

References: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review](http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review) [http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button- shapes](http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes) [http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann- ios-7/](http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/) [http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event](http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event)

<comment><USER44> The whole iOS 7 obviousness argument is ridiculous.

Of course iOS 6 was more obvious to Verge writers, they'd been using it for 3/4 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Likely an interesting article, but to warn you: it is difficult to read, due to, the, many, many, commas. And short sentences. And, short, pithy statements, with no, obvious direction, with added details thrown in, that are nothing, to do with the, main reason for this, paragraph. There is also consistent incessant name dropping.

Meant in good humour.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not to write an irrelevant comment, but printed out this article is 52 pages... c'mon, that's a bit excessive even if you really like Apple.

<comment><USER47> It's an article for a print magazine, not a Buzzfeed post.

<comment><USER48> 10 Jonny Ive quotes you'll have to read out of context. You'll never believe 7.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> A TL;DR would be useful. Is there a focus or a direction or a point somewhere in the article? I've read the first few pages but it's just a meandering nothingness so far.

<comment><USER50> Flushed out of the UK after a toilet manufacturer turned down his designs, Jony Ive, who is friends with Stephen Fry, Bono and lots of other celebs, clicked with Steve Jobs and now wants to retire but is chained in by the watch and the billion objects he designed that were sold, so he is driven around in a Bentley but hey he can get rid of Job's awful taste in calendar apps designed to look like the interior of his (now Ive's) private jet. The Apple store will have carpets because no one will buy a watch on a non carpeted floor.

<comment><USER51> So he wants to be free. Well, there is already a petition:

[https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his- white-...](https://www.change.org/p/apple-free-jony-ive-from-his-white-room)</comment></comment></comment>


Air Bike Could be a Solution to Pollution - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/video/india-air-bike-could-be-a-solution-to-pollution/60527412-D91E-41B3-B53B-3E12139E2821.html

<comment><USER2> The overall idea is cool, yet I wonder what is the performance of the "engine", like its max speed, horsepowers, and bars-per-miles usage :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to know what its total emissions are. I presume they would be using a petrol or diesel compressor.

<comment><USER4> The thing about electrical motors is that it can be fully driven with renewable resources. Sun, wind, hydroelectric, etc... if the compressors are driven off of electricity then the carbon footprint, in theory, could be 0. Whereas a motorbike that is petrol powered is guaranteed to have a finite amount of carbon emissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please place [video] in the title.

</comment><comment><USER6> aren't there some HNers working on a more sophisiticated variant of this sort of idea?</comment>


Free two meal tickets to Grubwithus in SF Sept 12  - <AUTHOR>

Bought 2 tickets to: http://www.grubwithus.com/restaurants/o-toro-sushi-san-francisco/meals/o-toro-sushi-san-francisco-sep-12-11
Can't make it, will give them out for free since they're non-refundable. Anyone in SF interested?
edit: ALL gone! thanks, have a fun dinner. <comment><USER2> Yup, would definitely take them!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm only giving one away per user so to make it fair :) shoot me and email at email@example.com and i'll email you the ticket later tonight. Have fun!</comment></comment>


Announcing .NET Core 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2017/08/14/announcing-net-core-2-0/ <comment><USER2> I wish I had a better sense of where cross-platform desktop app platforms stood these days: Electron, Java, .NET, QT. All I hear are "Eww, Electron is ridiculous, slow, heavy Web junk for desktop", "Eww Java is blub, insecure, and half-abandoned by Oracle", "Eww, .NET is Microsoft and unreliable for anything serious on non-MS OSes", "Eww, by the time you pay the license, learn QT, learn the odd variant of C++, and manually deal with different bugs on every platform, you discover you would have been better off using the OS makers' preferred tech on each," and so on.

It's hard to tell how much of this emotional reaction is due to current reality, how much is leftover from old experiences that are no longer relevant, how much is just language preference (not platform quality), etc.

I could just try them all, but my experience years ago was that the cross- platform tech, when it worked, made things easy at first, but that final 5% of your code was always trying to find hacks to do what no one had ever tried before--very time consuming and risky (no guarantee of success). So "trying them all" won't really give me a true sense of where the technologies are in reality.

There's no rush in my case, but I do wish I had a more realistic sense of what the various desktop dev technologies were like these days in case I ever go back to it.

<comment><USER3> I work on a cross-platform desktop application written in C#. We use .Net on Windows and Mono on Mac.

The thing with desktop applications is that an "industrial-strength" one needs to look native; thus it's in our best interest to use the native language of choice. This means that our Mac UI is Objective C, and we're very good at integrating Objective C and C#.

The other thing with desktop applications is that if you're doing something interesting, you probably need to call native APIs for OS concepts that are unique to each platform. A cross-platform environment can't do this very well; and we drop into C++ APIs on Windows and Objective C on Mac to do this.

The sweet spot for cross-platform development is your business logic, and networking calls. That shouldn't change as you move among platforms, and that should be the area that cross-platform development gets right. If you're willing to do this in C or C++, everything will be straightforward, but you have to deal with the warts of C and C++. If you need a higher-level language, it better integrate well with the languages you need to do your UI and low- level logic in.

<comment><USER4> > The thing with desktop applications is that an "industrial-strength" one > needs to look native

I don't think this is the case for every application. It's definitely true for mobile apps, and it's probably true for desktop apps that are relatively small and/or use mainly standard OS GUI functionality.

But for things like Photoshop, or Office, or Unity/Unreal, too much of the UI is application-specific for it to really matter, and I think they benefit from a consistent cross-platform codebase and appearance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been absolutely loving .NET Core since I started using it this spring. Currently running two applications in production, one on a Windows Server with IIS and another on a Centos 6 server with Docker. Docker was surprisingly easier than configuring Web Deploy to IIS. There have been a few things that are oddly documented, but generally documentation has improved over these months as user base has grown. They have some great videos on Microsoft Virtual Academy. Early on it felt like many packages weren't compatible (particularly PDF & Image tools), but as time has progressed many old packages have been converted to .Net Core. One project I converted was in PHP before, so I can't accurately speak to performance (obviously feels fast), but development speeds have increased greatly with IntelliSense vs a text-editor. Another project, I had a C++ console application that sort of needed to become a web application but wasn't worth the effort of rewriting. In relatively short order, I had a .Net Core web application using interop services to call the dll. I was later chided by some C# purists that it could have been rewritten in C#, but it was still cool to see how easy it was.

Ten years ago when I was starting out, Microsoft wasn't even a consideration when looking at toolsets, it was stodgy, expensive, and didn't run on a MacBook. Now, not only have they completely redesigned, and sold me on their development toolsets, but they've implemented an interesting alternative to AWS, and they've shifted my go-to machine from a Mac to a Windows machine. The turnaround is pretty remarkable (obviously they have remarkable resources, but still). I sort of want Michael Lewis, or someone, to write a book about the last decade at Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> Couldn't agree more. I've been using .Net Core 1.1 daily for the last couple of months building out a reasonably large Web API for a game.

The platform, tools and C# as a language are a pleasure to work with on both my Mac and Windows machines (small caveat on VS for Mac, it's still a bit lumpy)

I've been using Unity for about 8 years and I'm finally confident building a backend using .Net and basking in the joy of interfacing it with Unity.

When I first started using Unity many years ago, we used to say it made making games fun again. I can say .Net Core feels the same for Web/API development.

Kudos to all those who put effort into bringing 2.0 out.

<comment><USER7> > building out a reasonably large Web API for a game.

How are you hosting this? Can you share any experience? I built a Web API using .Net 4.6.1 and when it came time to host it, Azure DB, Azure Web App became quickly super expensive.

I'd be curious to know if you've find a cost-effective hosting solution for hosting .Net Core APIs in a Production-like environment for a SaaS website (which is what I'm building on the side)

<comment><USER8> I'm not OP but maybe I can chime in. My employer runs a fairly large application platform on Azure and I've used Azure for personal projects a few times.

Let me start off that you can host (ASP).NET Core projects just about anywhere, so using AWS is definitely a possibility. I myself use basic Azure functionality though. Here's what I do when costs are the limiting factor:

For storage, Azure used to provide a small (20MB) db instance for free in their 'free tier', but that doesn't seem to be available anymore.

As an alternative you should consider using Azure Table Storage instead of Azure DB.

While Azure DB offers a fully-functional SQL server instance, it will cost at least $5 per month to use on a basic plan. Using Table Storage (Azure's 'NoSQL' solution), on the other hand, is way cheaper. For a fairly small application with less than a hundred users my average monthly bill is $0.00. Even if it scales to a hundred thousands users (while it isn't really built for that) the costs for using Table Storage would probably still be less than a dollar per month.

Alternatively, you could use SQL Server Compact. This should be possible on Azure but I would not recommend going this route though.

As for hosting, my personal apps almost exclusively make use of the Free tier for App Services. For what my apps are doing this turns out to be efficient enough. If that's not enough, a simple Shared hosting environment is also pretty cheap at less than $10 per month.

It only gets expensive if you really need dedicated VMs running for you but even then $50 per month for a dedicated machine shouldn't break the bank if your SaaS business is actually going somewhere, plus scaling it up or out is dead simple. On average I spend more time per month babysitting the single VM I have with RackSpace where I run old (non-azure) webapps than our entire team spends managing our azure environments (DTAP) with hundreds of apps and databases.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Very useful info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm enjoying reaping the rewards of all the dotnet core work in my F# projects.

One critique:

Why break semver?

[https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/faq.md#w...](https://github.com/dotnet/standard/blob/master/docs/faq.md#what- about-the-breaking-change-between-net-standard-1x-and-20)

Like I get that it _feels_ like a big change (and it is), but you've gone and confused a huge population of library writers and users with the major version bump.

[https://github.com/search?q=netstandard2.0&type=Issues&utf8=...](https://github.com/search?q=netstandard2.0&type=Issues&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

How many of those are irrelevant or invalid? That's just github. I already see the noise being created in slack and gitter channels as well.

Other than that I think dotnet core is an amazing engineering effort and I've been happy using F# on OSX with it.

<comment><USER10> do you still need to install mono in addition to core to get autocomplete on vscode ?

<comment><USER9> Yes

[https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode- fsharp#mono](https://github.com/ionide/ionide-vscode-fsharp#mono)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks like VS 15.3 is official too

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/08/14/vis...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2017/08/14/visual- studio-2017-version-15-3-released/)

<comment><USER12> Here's the associated submission:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009929)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does .NET Core also include a cross platform GUI toolkit? (Windows.Forms and WPF come to mind)

If not, what toolkit would be recommended these days for this purpose?

<comment><USER14> Not specificly .NET Core, but Xamarin is already available for macOS and is, afaik, actively working on Xamarin.Forms coming to desktop, including Linux.

<comment><USER15> Blog post announcing this feature [https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future- xamarin-forms-3-0/](https://blog.xamarin.com/glimpse-future-xamarin- forms-3-0/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good video overview of everything: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2mMbjw6cLA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2mMbjw6cLA)

</comment><comment><USER17> For those of you who are using VSTS: CI/CD or VSTS: Build please note that we're still updating our hosted build image but that should be done in the next few days.

We'll also be sure to update the docs here with the list of what is supported: [https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/docs/build/concepts/agent...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/docs/build/concepts/agents/hosted#software)

<comment><USER18> I just realized that Hosted VS2017 is still using Visual Studio 2017 (15.1 Update). That's two versions behind now. When is it going to get the 15.3 update?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why are there so few new languages built on the .NET platform ? This is a genuine question - is there something about the JVM that gives rise to such vibrant ecosystems.

Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, JRuby : Most importantly, every one of them is in production use - not just as toy/experimental languages. And we havent even opened the Pandora's box that is Java 9+Truffle.

There's a lot of broscience that .NET is superior to the JVM - is that on sheer performance only ?

<comment><USER20> The .NET runtime is not superior to the JVM and probably never has been. Certainly not in performance. The JVM stomps .NET CLR in performance.

C# has been superior to Java, as a language, for quite a long time (IMHO) and likely always will be. The libraries, well, I don't know. Pretty similar I guess.

The thing to consider about programming languages is there's no way to make money from them anymore. That means they're either loss leaders for some other product (Swift : iOS, C# : Windows), the result of academic research (Scala, Haskell, etc), one man's personal quest to redefine coding (Clojure, Groovy, Ruby), or the result of a company attempting to optimise its own processes or products (Go, JavaScript, Kotlin). Oh yes. And then there's C++ which defies categorisation :-)

So now you look at the categories above and what do you observe? That a lot of the developers will be essentially hobbyist in nature, or working on products that are often used on UNIX. These people will want to build on a cross platform runtime. Until recently .NET was not cross platform.

JVM bytecode is also a bit simpler than .NET bytecode and has better support for dynamic languages. Many languages are dynamic.

<comment><USER21> .NET always had AOT compilation from day 1, and now has .NET Native, which is the same backend as Visual C++.

It had forks being used to write Singularity and Midori, and official support for unsafe code if performance required it to, including ways to manually manage memory.

The CLR has native APIs for IL rewriting engines, via the profiler native API.

Supports value types, SIMD, and the roadmap to C# 8.0 will be adding more features bringing C# low level capabilities closer to C++.

Java will be getting some of these goodies as per Java Language Summit 2017, but they are all targeting Java 10 or later, while .NET is delivering them on 2017.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _" You can now refer to .NET Core/.NET Standard libraries from .NET Framework projects and vice versa. No need to manually add interop NuGet packages – Visual Studio does this for you automatically."_

Excellent. Hopefully developers moves over to .Net Core en masse now, and I won't have to wait long for all my third party projects to switch over.

</comment><comment><USER23> Am I misunderstanding something, or does Entity Framework Core, even at version 2.0, not support translating LINQ code into GROUP BY in the generated SQL? That seems so unbelievable that I figure I have to be wrong here.

</comment><comment><USER24> Perfect example of a strong technology that has really been hurt by strategic errors.

Whatever success .NET did have, it was still largely pigeonholed as just something for Microsoft stack devotees.

There was no technical reason the essence of the new core version couldn't have been a priority 20 years ago. Not only cross platform and open source, but acting earlier and more aggressively to dispel patent trap mistrust. It cost precious momentum.

No doubt hindsight makes it easy to say all this now, but there was still an issue of entrenched thinking about the way things had always been before, combined with a circle the wagons mentality.

One part of it I think was easy to see, was that free high quality development tools should have been widely available day one. How does it make any sense for a company to try and make $5000 off of a copy of visual studio, at the expense of platform momentum that is driving $200 billion a year in revenue?

<comment><USER21> 20 years ago there was Rotor (aka Shared Source CLI), but it was another management in place.

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc749640.aspx](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc749640.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Trying to get it working on Linux, I had to manually fix some permission errors, and now am stuck on this helpful error message: No executable found matching command "dotnet-net"

Not a great experience, especially since I was able to get 1.1 working quite easily.

</comment><comment><USER26> With "Live Unit Testing Support" it seems that NCrunch is about to become redundant.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/live- unit...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/live-unit-testing)

[http://www.ncrunch.net/](http://www.ncrunch.net/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Whats support like for non MSSQL databases these days like? Can MySQL & Postgres be easily hooked up and used??

<comment><USER28> I'ved used [http://www.npgsql.org/](http://www.npgsql.org/) to great effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Beside C#, what other languages are considered to have first class support

I know VB .Net might be implicit here, but I am not so sure as I dont hear much about it anymore and I think it is no longer adding new features

And I know that there is some F# support

So aside from those two (VB .Net and F#) ... any other languages have serious support for .net core?

<comment><USER10> i tried f# and it really feels like a second classe citizen ( at least on macos). Very few educational resources. You still need to spend a lot of time on c sharp to learn the frameworks, and then maybe move to f#.

<comment><USER30> The problem is F# does not use the Roslyn compiler (but does use other components of the Roslyn tool stack in Visual Studio) and it uses things in the IL (primarily tail calls) the other .NET languages do not -- and the rest of the Microsoft teams understandably want to move fast on all the initiatives surrounding .NET Core.

This results in the Microsoft F# team and the F# community contributors playing catch-up. Eventually F# will catch-up, but it is going to take time.

<comment><USER31> Microsoft's own .NET Native runtime is simply not .NET compliant [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007166)

This is unacceptable and should be fixed ASAP. F# is a mature language existing for more than a decade, there is simply no excuse to let this slide.

<comment><USER30> Microsoft had to fix the C# compiler. The result was Roslyn. It's actually amazing that Roslyn was a successful project. Probably most software projects that ambitious fail. The project would have failed if they tried to make it F# compliant at the same time.

Speaking as someone who makes his living writing F# code, I'm as frustrated as anyone about this, but there will be a successful resolution. I just don't know how soon. Before today's announcements my personal thinking was that it would be this autumn. That's still possible. In the meantime I can still function in the F# world, as before. It just remains frustrating to branch out into some of the areas I would like to.

<comment><USER31> If it's going to be fixed this year, then why isn't it even on the official road map? [https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/2400](https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/issues/2400)

<comment><USER30> You're absolutely correct about .NET native not being .NET compliant...sigh...there are just higher priorities for such a big company. As quoted in the comments " [F# native support] depends on the Core CLR team improving support for a couple of big items. dotnet native is and AOT compilation are absolutely a goal for us ... they just are longer term than this roadmap anticipates."

It's actually eye-opening how few the number of people at MS who actually write code is. I suppose if there were more coders they would be stepping all over each other and never get anything done.

<comment><USER21> Politics more likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does someone has some experience running .NET Core on Linux? Any problems/experiences you could share?

<comment><USER16> We've been running high-traffic production services for months, everything's been great. Leaner faster apps running on smaller, cheaper Linux VMs and containers. No problems encountered.

For running typical webapps and services, the existing .NET APIs were already good enough and now we have pretty much everything else available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I find weird that Asp.NET Core 2.0 was announced before .NET Core 2.0

<comment><USER34> All within hours. Basically, they all shipped at the same time. Blog posts were manually published. There is no order implied.

</comment></comment><comment> pi-rat \- CI/CD support for containers

Anyone know what that's about?</comment>


Why We'll Never Meet Aliens - <AUTHOR> http://paultyma.blogspot.in/2013/04/why-well-never-meet-aliens.html?m=1

<comment><USER2> Because we are the first aliens to visit other planet.</comment>


Why Hong Kong protesters didn't use their own metro cards - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1642441/extradition-law-why-hong-kong-protesters-didnt-use-own-metro-cards/ <comment><USER2> People who live in fear of their government deserve a better government .... luckily history shows those governments fail

<comment><USER3> Does it?

History shows that all governments fail, but does it show that governments people live in fear of fail faster?

Is history still relevant? The creation of cameras, high speed communications, and computers fundamentally changes the question. The capabilities of citizens, governments, and bystanders have all changed. The capabilities are still rapidly changing, e.g. facial recognition, and drones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They didn't use their metro cards but did use their cellphones, as it can be seen in the pictures. The government can easily know that they were there, as they can be triangulated using the cellphone towers information.

Not using their cards is useless.

<comment><USER5> With one million people on the street, I don't know if that information is really useful in this case.

<comment><USER6> But then that reasoning could apply to the train cards.

<comment><USER7> Our train cards (Octopus card) are often linked to our bank accounts so that we can use the Automatic Add Value Service (AAVS). The only people travelling to Causeway Bay and from Admiralty at that time would be protestors so it would be fairly trivial to link protestors to individual identities using the cards.

It wouldn't be too hard triangulating the cell towers because we have a huge population density and, hence, cell towers attached to nearly every building. But I feel this data would be harder to get hold of and may catch the hundreds of thousands of "innocent" people who live in those buildings.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Failure Friday: How We Ensure PagerDuty is Always Reliable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/11/failure-friday-at-pagerduty/

<comment><USER2> I posted this on the blog but I thought I'd repeat it here:

The simian army isn't AWS only. :) Some of it runs on other stacks.

And the best part is, it is open source! So if you wanted to leverage the simian army, it wouldn't be that hard to modify it to run on whatever stack you want and then submit the changes back. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> We just started using PagerDuty to deliver our Nagios alerts to landlines and mobile phones after losing confidence in Vodafone's pager network.

The other thing we like is the integration with HipChat to deliver alerts into our NOC chat room.

Overall we've been quite impressed....will be more impressed if you folks run into actual trouble but we still get our alerts :)

<comment><USER4> That's great to hear (HipChat integration is my possibly favourite feature).

We do occasionally post about trouble that we've survived, [http://blog.pagerduty.com/2012/07/a-utc-leap-second-vs- derec...](http://blog.pagerduty.com/2012/07/a-utc-leap-second-vs-derecho/) caused us some mild stress but no missed alerts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Annecdotal I know, however: pager duty is the only service we rely on that has yet to go down on us. These guys are solid!

I like that tip on how to simulate a slow network too.

</comment><comment><USER6> My first impression from the title was that this is a post-mortem for an actual failure on Friday. But after reading your post the title made more sense ;)

Great post!.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's Wednesday!</comment>