Ask YC: How do you invest your money for long term growth? - <AUTHOR>

There have been various side investing discussions in various threads. Here is one straight on for usefulness and clarity.
I realize investing is very case by case, so here's a (I hope relevent) case:
--Assume you have a good sum of money to set aside (and not touch) for three decades.
--The main goal with this money is for long term growth.
--Assume it is enough money where dividing it up at the 1% level makes sense.
--Assume it is enough money where your access to desired investments is possible and makes sense.
--Speak in %s so it easily translates, e.g. I would put x% in commodities.
If I'm missing anything to make this a good question, please clarify.
And if your strategy involves more actively assessing things from time to time, please also include what it tells you to do right now. <comment><USER3> The benefits of diversification are vastly overstated. Especially over long time periods, the benefits of buying e.g. your 5 best ideas rather than your 10 best ideas vastly outweigh the benefits of having less volatility. If you have time to do the research, do this: find companies that are either the low- cost provider, the most-loved brand, or have special government-protected status in their industry. Examples would be Coca-Cola, Wal Mart, Kraft, etc. Possibly, rule out companies whose managers make irresponsible financial decisions (like over-leveraging at a bank, or buying back stock at high prices like Coca-Cola). When these stocks are cheaper than the broader market, buy them. If one of them rises enough that, after capital gains taxes, you're getting more annual earnings per dollar invested in another company of similar or better business characteristics, sell the expensive one and buy the cheap one.

Basically, your goal should be to have a portfolio you don't have to follow, of companies that will tend to grow their earnings faster than their capital and thus throw off free cash for shareholders. If you can get these at a fair price, your net worth should grow nicely.

However, this is difficult to articulate and extremely hard advice to follow. Perhaps it would be better to put most of your money in an index fund, and do this with the rest of your money long enough to see if it works for you. Sadly, this kind of strategy should be judged over a longer time period (like five years). So, index fund or take your chances.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you follow this strategy yourself? If so, what is your portfolio right now?

<comment><USER3> I do follow this strategy, but I also invest in weird little situations that don't fit into it (e.g. a small, post-bankrupt manufacturing company with a hugely overfunded pension, managed by a billionaire trader). I don't like to discuss specifics of what I invest in now. However, stuff I bought in the past includes NDAQ and IBA; huge mistakes include buying MOVI and MGAM (I sold for more or less unrelated reasons), and not-buying DAKT (I sold after a good earnings report -- it's up 150% since then) and not-buying AAPL (I was researching it, then they announced their first million songs sold through iTunes, the stock went up about 15%, and I said "Nahhh" and decided to wait for it to calm down. That was when it was at, uh, $9. Ouch).

I'm sure this is frustratingly vague.

If you start to pay attention to business -- not in the sense of reading the _WSJ_ , but just looking at how consumers behave -- you'll eventually detect some companies that are either a) able to ask for a higher price than anybody else, or b) able to make acceptable stuff more cheaply than anybody else. About 99% of businesses are second-best or less at one of these things, and those businesses are fundamentally unable to grow without investing equivalent capital. The other 1% can usually have above-average growth without having to reinvest all of their earnings, or have steady earnings that are high compared to invested capital but that can't be easily grown. An example of the former would be a software company or a drug company -- it costs a lot to create a product, but the cost of selling it to a million people is not that much more than the cost of selling it to ten thousand. An example of the latter would be the gravel and sand business -- nobody is going to import ten tons of the stuff from overseas, or even across state lines, so it's basically a business made of hundreds of tiny local monopolies. Some of these are exceedingly well- managed; they pay dividends when their stock is high, and buy it back when their stock is low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I looked into this awhile back and quickly came to the conclusion, based on the several books I read, that it's silly to try to beat the market long term. "The Intelligent Investor" is the one that laid it out clearly to me. The main point is: the performance of narrow investments (specific stocks) can't be reliably predicted, but the market as a whole tends to grow over time. Therefore, invest in the market as a whole. (== S&P index fund)

<comment><USER5> Index funds are the way to go. They are a passive instrument, so you cannot (should not) be actively trading them. When you put money in an index fund, you essentially buy shares of that fund (along with several others). There is a fee attached to every trade, and that fee is consumed by all share holders equally. So most index funds will penalize you for trading those shares actively.

The way I look at it, an index fund (like S&P index fund) is merely a layer of abstraction over trading stocks. But instead of putting all your money in one stock, the index fund divies up your money across many different companies and sectors in the same ratio as the target index. This protects you from major fluctuations in the market, so in the long term you essentially grow at the same rate as the index. On the flip side, if one of those companies sees astronomical growth, you won't see the same growth.

[All: This is my understanding of index funds, so if I am wrong, please, do correct me]

There are several good books in the market if you want to go down this route, including the aforementioned "The Intelligent Investor" [must read] and "A random walk down wall street"

Another book that I surprisingly found to be very good was "Mutual funds for dummies" [<http://tinyurl.com/5ulpvw>][The other book "Personal finance for dummies" by the same author is a good book too. There is another one [<http://tinyurl.com/5wso5z>] that is short and sweet to read.

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> I would avoid buying a single index fund though. I go with small cap growth funds 50% US, 25% Europe, 25% Asia and rebalance them every 6 months.

PS: Outside of a Roth IRA / 401k rebalancing stocks has some negative tax consequences so it's better to change what your buying than sell off existing stock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Generally unless you're a genius in the field (ie, Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch etc) you will not beat the market, so what you have to do is join it. Take your money and spread it widely across sectors, indecies and geographical regions - if you spread it well enough, your money will grow at the rate of the global economy which is realistically the most you can hope for.

The second thing is to separate your investments from your speculations. Your investments targeted for long-term growth should be handled as above - <USER2> them widely and sit on them for a long time. Your speculations should be money you can easily afford to lose and you should do with them whatever you instincts tell you. This can be things like buying stock in a particular company or commodity, trading currencies etc.

Finally, you need an excellent book: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street>

<comment><USER3> You can expect your money to grow at more than the rate of global economic growth if you own equities rather than fixed-income, unless you are arguing that investors are indifferent to risk (which can't be true if they use leverage).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two recommendations for reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (mentioned in another post, long, detailed, and entertaining), and The Coffeehouse Investor (short and funny). Both lay out the principles behind the theory of efficient markets, and make a great case for it.

In a nutshell: buy the cheapest unmanaged index funds you can find. Come up with an allocation you're comfortable with (e.g., 50% large cap, 20% mid-cap, 20% small-cap, 10% international equity). Reallocate once a year so that your investments still follow the same rough percentages; that way you won't have more risk exposure to any particular asset class just because it happened to have done well or poorly in any given year. That's it. You will not outperform the market by picking your own investments or playing hedging games with derivatives, and, over the medium-to-long term, neither will any fund manager. Since you're in this for the long term, have fun in life and don't bother checking your balances except when you get your quarterly statements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are those the asset allocation % you use? Also, what about commodities, real estate, infrastructure, and other asset classes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here is what I do \- I keep 2 months' worth of income in a high-yield saving account (a la ING) This amounts to about 5 months of living expenses for me, so it is a good safety net. \- I stash away a small majority (say, 60%) of my long-term savings into index funds and relatively safe, stable stocks \- Since I am fairly young (27), I invest a sizeable chunk (but still a minority; say, 40%) of my savings into riskier stocks with a potential to be a home-run down the road. I only invest into companies and technologies that interest or excite me. This makes research a pleasure rather than a chore.

The ratios will tip towards the conservative side as I get older.

</comment><comment><USER10> Traditionally, investing in a Small Cap Value eft or index fund would have earned you about 2% more than the market on average. It's the only asset class that has consistently beat the market over the last 100 years. I know several smart people in finance who use this long-term strategy.

Had you been doing this over the last three years, however, the results would not have been pretty.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can think of two very important principles to keep in mind:

-Diversification: Commodities, property, and bonds often do well when stocks fall. Economic shocks can happen that are localized to a single country or region. It makes sense to put your eggs in several different baskets, both by asset type and by geography.

-Long-term inexorable trends: The world's population is getting older. Well-run but less-developed economies will tend to grow faster than well-established ones. Invest in "iceberg" trends, those that are slow-moving, easy to predict, and hard to stop. I recommend medical ETFs and emerging market ETFs

Of course, throw in some traditional investments while you're at it. Don't get cocky or daring and don't let short term variations spook you. Trading too much can knock a significant percentage off of your returns.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The comments so far are espousing passive investment strategy and good asset allocation, which I agree with, but I was looking for something a little more concrete.

So in effort to engender some discussion with hard %s, the following is where I am right now (excluding equity in primary residence). The accuracy (beyond decimal point) is certainly irrelevant, but it came right off a spreadsheet and I left it in because it sums to 100.

US Large Cap: 21.87%

US Mid Cap: 8.35%

US Small Cap: 3.03%

Commodities: 8.47%

Real Estate: 6.26%

International Equities: 7.55%

Emerging Market Equities: 4.63%

Cash: 12.71%

Bonds: 27.13%

The Bonds are in a 10 year ladder. The Cash is in FDIC insured money market accounts. All the rest is in index vehicles.

I'm very interested in any feedback and also what your numbers are.

<comment><USER3> Depends on the stocks. Unlike many modern investors, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trading something as an asset class rather than as part ownership of a business. You end up doing things like investing in oil companies _and_ investing directly in commodities, which is redundant -- the oil companies are basically a portfolio of call options on oil, where the strike price is the cost of extraction.

Think about it: if you told Andrew Carnegie you were putting "21.87%" of your money into "US Large Cap," he'd laugh his ass off. He'd ask why you knew, to four figures, what kind of stocks you were investing in, but didn't bother to talk about what they made, who ran them, or how much money they earned. He'd ask why you would prefer buying $100 million of cash flow for $2 billion rather than $1 billion, as an allocation based on market cap would have you do. Carnegie is a great example, because for a while he was purely an investor -- he had a diversified portfolio of stocks in companies whose management he knew personally, and he paid careful attention to their business performance and the dividends they paid, not their market price.

Don't do anything Carnegie, Morgan, or Rockefeller wouldn't recognize as an investment, and you should be okay.

<comment><AUTHOR> I said specifically _The accuracy (beyond decimal point) is certainly irrelevant, but it came right off a spreadsheet and I left it in because it sums to 100._

As for indexes vs individual stocks, I don't want to spend that much time worrying about (or tweaking) my investment portfolio.

So, for you, it _depends on the stocks._ But if you work backwards, where does that come out on an asset class basis? Are you buying no international equities? No commodities? No REITs? What are the actual %s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some great answers here, and mine is not going to be an answer to you specifically, but might open some minds nonetheless.

I try to invest in "myself." Rather than supporting those producing, innovating, and providing value to the economy, I try to be a producer, innovator, and value provider myself.

This attitude works well in your 20s, at least, but might not seem so alluring when closer to retirement.

It is not uncommon, however, to see or hear about situations where someone has started a business with a reasonably small amount of money (<$50k) and even if they're not worth mega-millions, their business can grow to the point where it provides the owner with a high income and can effectively manage itself (if you get the right people). This technique makes you a producer rather than an investor in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER13> A small proportion in cash (enough to survive for a year or two if I want to stop being employed). The rest in equity index funds, spread between UK, US, Europe, Japan/Pacific. Some of those equities are in retirement funds for the tax advantages, and for the discipline of not being able to spend them any time soon.

That seems reasonable for me now, as someone who's young and employed. My future earnings ("human capital") are likely to be bigger than my current financial assets (because I'm young) and fairly steady and bond-like. As I get older, or if I become self-employed, I would move more of my financial wealth into safer assets (eg long-dated index-linked bonds).

</comment><comment><USER14> For most of my retirement money, I follow the "Lazy Portfolio" method. Some examples and results are tracked here:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/lazy-portfolios- annual...](http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/lazy-portfolios-annual- update- going/story.aspx?guid=%7B73F4BC3A%2DD0EF%2D4BFA%2D9698%2D01D8DA27C91A%7D&dist=hpmymw)

Basically, you buy indexes across asset classes so you have diversification within each asset class as well as asset diversification.

It's easy, cheap, and works. It's just not "sexy"

</comment><comment><USER15> One point about the index funds (besides from being very hard to beat the market even working full time on it) is that the huge fees compounding on hedge and mutual funds also take away most of your gains. 2% compounded over 30 years wipes out a lot of the alpha.

This podcast is an excellent intro to index funds and how fees decimate returns (also a fantastic entrepreneurial story): [http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/02/vv_show_28_john_bogle_of...](http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/02/vv_show_28_john_bogle_of_the_v.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I highly recommend the Agora Financial Group and their various newsletters.

Back when I had a little money to play with, I was following a couple of them (Penny Investor and another), and was able to gain 40% in a year (someone else was doing the actual work for me). But that's just anecdotal evidence.

I also like their whole philosophy; they've had several NYT #1 bestsellers, 'cause it's both commonsensical and also exceedingly contrarian at the same time. (Addison Wiggins and Bill Bonner.)

</comment><comment><USER17> I subscribe to a few newsletters put out by the Motley Fool with the general targets being smaller, lesser known, less covered companies that have great long-term prospects currently priced at a discount to their computed intrinsic value. My target allocation is 100% equities. What you need more than anything else is the willingness and discipline to apply your investment strategy when the market is acting irrationally.

</comment><comment><USER18> Invest 100% of your money in small-cap/value funds. They do best in the long run.

Invest 100% of your money in BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China). They have large, youthful populations with better prospects than America, Europe, or China.

I'm afraid that I don't know of any small-cap/value, BRIC funds. If anyone knows of any, I'd appreciate a pointer. Thanks.

<comment><USER19> Earlier this week, I put a lot of my money into two ETF's, EWZ (Brazil), and FXI (China). They have great technical setups if you are believe in that as well. Good time to buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have read on a previous comment in another story about "shorting bonds and longing stocks" but this was given as an example of a bad idea. Why is it so? If in the long term stocks outperform bonds wouldn't this actually be a good strategy for a long-term investor? Obviously the risks would be higher, but since it is over the long term it shouldn't matter, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you go back to that thread, it concludes that there is indeed a place for equities in a balanced portfolio. Your point is exactly the one I was trying to make!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know its cheesy, but I really would rather invest in myself (Education, Business suit etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> The question assumes you have money set aside in a thirty year time horizon with the goal of long term growth. Or are you saying that you put all your retirement money into your startups?

Also, for the purposes of the question, assume you have enough money where education expenditures don't impact this portion.

<comment><USER21> I would bet on myself (I know more about that subject)

<comment><USER22> What do you do with the money you're not spending?

<comment><USER23> He bets it on himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I posted this yesterday: "The best investment advice you'll never get"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178443>

</comment><comment><USER25> go to vanguard and invest your money in several different, diverse, low-cost funds. index funds are great, but you can't buy only index funds and be diverse. buy some REITs, some bonds, etc..

spread the money out, no more than 20% in any single fund unless the fund itself is diverse.

sit on it for a long time.

thats it.

<comment><AUTHOR> What %s do you suggest in particular across the various asset classes?

<comment><USER25> well, this is how i invest, specifically. i'm young and more aggressive:

35% domestic 500 index

15% foreign developed markets

20% foreign developing markets

10% REITs

10% intermediate-term bonds

10% inflation-protected bonds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> vanguard index fund or fidelity spartan fund (which actually is a money loser for fidelity, but they keep the fees at .1% as a loss-leader to bring in the chumps for the managed mutual funds)

no-load, low-fee index funds, basically.

</comment><comment><USER27> Berkshire Hathaway.

<comment><USER28> I wonder what's gonna happen when Buffet retires.

<comment><USER29> If things go downhill, it'd happen slowly. The management team at Berkshire is good and Warren had his pick of replacements. Plus they hold so many companies and are pretty hands-off with each of them.

<comment><USER28> I'm just wondering if there is going to be a big drop the second the news is announced, even if it is unwarranted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out [http://seekingalpha.com/article/66982-berkshire-hathaway- app...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/66982-berkshire-hathaway-appears- undervalued)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


N-dimensional complex numbers - bra-ket http://www.alenspage.net/ComplexNumbers.htm <comment><AUTHOR> A reinvention of quaternions and Clifford Algebra? There is also a very good book by David Hestenes about the application of Clifford Algebra in 3-D space ([http://www.springer.com/de/book/9789027716736](http://www.springer.com/de/book/9789027716736)).

</comment><comment><USER2> Curious to see the 3D and 4D Mandelbrot using this method. Should look something like the last visualization on this page [http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbrot.html](http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbrot.html) but with more bulbs?

<comment><USER3> Lont time ago when I was in high school I had a fascination for quaternions and wrote a mandelbrot implementation for them in a weird c like language on the Amiga. Unfortunately it turned out that the 4d mandelbrot set was just the normal one swept around the two new axes.

Now that I actually know how to program and it doesn't take hours to render an image it might be time to revisit this!

<comment><USER4> "weird c like language on the Amiga"

Was that BCPL?

<comment><USER3> I think it was called E!

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On mobile I can't read this article. Paragraphs end midway.

<comment><USER6> Mobile-friendly view sort of works in Chrome.

<comment><USER5> I viewed this in Chrome and Firefox (mobile), it's horrible in both cases.

Here is sample paragraph from Chrome:

First column:

        "...This answer indicates that a straightforward"

Second column:

        "This notion of notion of mathematical impossibility..."

I thought I was going crazy and then searched all nearby paragraphs for continuation, until I noticed last sentence in a paragraph was missing its lower half.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think it makes sense to say "the x direction and i direction" about the number "x + iy". How about "the 1 direction and i direction"?

<comment><USER8> Or just the real and imaginary axes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clifford Algebra are century hold. Why would you need a new one...?

</comment><comment><USER10> He has a weird antifeminist essay on that site, with a jab at transgender identity at the end: [http://www.alenspage.net/Man.Woman.htm](http://www.alenspage.net/Man.Woman.htm)</comment>


How good code dies - <AUTHOR> https://nilsnh.no/2018/01/13/how-good-code-dies/ <comment><USER2> Github (and probably some other code hosting sites) should really more prominently display download (clone) stats like NPM does. Only seeing "last commit: 6 months ago" for a perfectly relevant library can make people think they should look for something more "active". I mean... probably :)</comment>


We made something. We use it. We love it. Apple rejected it - <AUTHOR> http://www.huemanapp.com/apple.html <comment><USER2> First of all, that sounds like a _really_ cool idea for an app. I want it.

But secondly, of all the app rejection stories I've ever heard... this one is the easiest to fix. Just add some more features, who cares, and resubmit it.

Ideas: annotate/categorize the things that are making you happy/unhappy. Maybe have categories/icons for them. (Friends, party, loneliness, exercise, ate well, ate bad, had sex, no sex, fought, made up, my team won, etc. -- there really aren't _that_ many fundamental things.) Then also produce charts showing how your happiness correlates with those items.

Heck, you might even be able to produce an amazing academic paper or two with the dataset you produce. Or at least some really cool and fascinating blog entries from the data.

(Personally, I'd rather rate my happiness on a 1-10 scale rather than compare with yesterday, and also maybe be asked 3-4 times a day. Maybe features let you pick those.)

<comment><USER3> Have you ever seen a good movie? Think for a second about that movie. What made it good?

Now imagine if you could make that movie even better for yourself. Imagine this movie was distributed along with a plastic box with a few knobs and dials on it. Wouldn't it be a _better_ movie if you could turn the knobs to adjust the parameters of the movie -- there really aren't _that_ many fundamental parameters to movies. You could adjust the heights of the actors, or the amount of furniture in a scene, or the physicality of risk and harm that characters endured, or even just add more redheads.

What if that box also asked what kind of movie you're in the mood for, or who your other favorite directors are. Then the movie could switch out some plot elements and style decisions to become a little bit more like another movie you wanted to watch.

Or what if instead of watching one particular movie you could just add movies together. Like say you wanted to watch Terminator 2, but alternating scenes with Clueless. Or maybe you could just put picture-in-picture, with all your favorite movies together on the same screen!

How great would that be!

<comment><USER4> What if the movie came with the full set of trailers (preview, theatrical, etc.) for the movie? And had a director's commentary track? With a second audio track that had the actors telling jokes? Or even just take all of the funny moments that happened while filming, where people missed their lines, and put them on the same DVD? Maybe they could even throw in an entirely different ending for the movie that was replaced or removed late in the process?

Seriously: I appreciate the point you are trying to make here, but you chose a horrible example that I think actually argues that adding random features isn't a big deal :/. Besides, they already claim to have a bunch of features planned anyway: it isn't like the developers are seemingly of the "this is the exact app that should be released, and there should be no random additions or extra features added, as doing so would ruin the whole experience"...

> The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native > iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph > views and scrubbing, ability to add media. etc... And by eventually letting > people combine their data, you will be able to see how their relative > happiness aligns to other users, a neighborhood and even the world.

(It is also possible, however, that I totally misunderstood your response, and you are actually saying that having a happiness index that you kept track of on a moment-to-moment basis while watching a movie would let you optimize the movie according to your personal tastes. I feel like that's lower probability --more dots need connecting for that--but if I did actually misunderstand your comment I'm sorry that my response just adds to the confusion.)

<comment><USER3> I guess what I'm getting at is that some of the nicest things in this world are what they are because of spaces not filled in, or aspects that aren't shoved into tropes, or—if you'll excuse the cliché—notes not played.

I think we're all in agreement that this sounds like a cool app. I'm just lamenting the lack of creative authority given to its developers, regardless of whatever their future plans may be.

<comment><USER4> Yet throwing in an instrumental version of the song seems to generally work out fine (or an alternative version that is a duet with Rihanna); you seem to be stuck on "there are bad things that can be added to something that make it worse" when you are simply plucking examples chosen to be uniquely the most bad, even when there are obvious examples that no one has a problem with for the exact same cases that no one has a problem with (and are even semi- expected these days).

I mean, a movie release on DVD with just be movie and nothing more is simply _not done_ and many people would consider it cheap and disappointing. The reaction most people who have to a movie that is only 20 minutes long is or a song that was only 30 seconds long is going to be similar: I doubt many movie theaters, radio stations, or content distributors, would consider the "short" sufficient.

In this case, we know the developers have "notes left to play", and could spend the time to do those now. Clearly, I would be the first to point at Apple and say "this is not a legitimate selection criteria" (sufficiently so that even bothering to say it explicitly is kind if redundant ;P), but if I were those developers... this is just a really self-defeating reaction that is not likely to sway either Apple or the people who actually like Apple not wanting to sell things that don't feel "complete enough".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With all their patent trolling and absurd tyrannical control over the app store, I have no idea why so many tech-saavy people still love Apple.

<comment><USER6> We love what Apple did for the industry, we love using their products, we have varying levels of problems with them as a company. Some are very high, some are low, but that's unrelated to what you're perceiving, which is a love of what they did for the industry and the products that we use.

<comment><USER7> Popularizing walled gardens? Yah I'm never going to forget that.

ever.

<comment><USER8> And going "nuclear" on Android because they felt that their iOS was soooo original it should be protected by all patents, trademarks and laws in place. Apple is the Disney of IT, seriously.

<comment><USER9> It was so original.

I can't believe _anyone_ contests this.

I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. Compared to all other phones it was 10 years ahead in vision. All other phones were suddenly ludicrously laid out, with stupid designs. Even the settings section for the iPhone blew every single other phone in existence out of the water. Something that simple, that essential, had been revolutionised by this thoughtful new way at looking at phone interfaces.

Android, on that very day, looked like _every_ other phone. 10 years behind, old, tired, pathetic, no vision what so ever.

In less than 6 months the android team lifted every single iPhone design element, added very little of their own and unveiled what is possibly one of the biggest design rip-offs in tech history.

I can understand why Jobs was pissed.

<comment><USER10> This is complete bollocks.

[http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...](http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_)

<comment><USER11> It's not bollocks; we now have Google engineers on record that they had to substantially rethink Android in the wake of the iPhone announcement.

> Chris DeSalvo's reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. "As a > consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google > engineer, I thought 'We're going to have to start over.'"

> On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy > Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with > one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for > the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. > Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a > meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the > webcast.

> "Holy crap," he said to one of his colleagues in the car. "I guess we're not > going to ship that phone."

[http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the- day-...](http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-day-google- had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/)

This is not one of those Apple vs Google fights; it's straight up well-sourced journalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So how's the Android version doing? Please tell me there is one. Because complaining about the walled garden and then ignoring the larger and more open platform, that's rather silly.

<comment><USER13> Larger? It's not that easy. There is more Android smartphones sold than Apple phones yep, but 1. thanks to telcos a lot of Android users don't even know what is Android/Google Play (= they'll never download apps) and 2. global app store revenues are still higher on iOS versus Google Play.

<comment><USER14> The downloads stat is no longer true[1]. Revenue is still much higher on iOS, but the trends have been clear, and cannot be ignored. Before, it was "Android is open, but there are way more iPhones", then it was "Android has more phones but iPhones get more downloads", it won't be long until revenue surpases it too.

[1] [http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/07/31/google-play-passes- app...](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/07/31/google-play-passes-apples-app- store-in-total-downloads/)

EDIT: More stats on revenue:

In nov 2012 the gap was 4x

[http://www.startable.com/2012/11/](http://www.startable.com/2012/11/)

As of Q3 2013 the gap was 2x

[http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-11-03-google- play...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-11-03-google-play-has- half-the-revenue-of-app-store-with-more-downloads)

They're catching up, and fast.

<comment><USER15> Plus that ignores ad revenue, more Android apps are ad supported

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a common enough rejection; I've gotten it before and know other people who have too. You can respond to them and clarify why this set of functionality is right, that it's a new app and will have features added in the future, etc. Worked for me, anyway.

<comment><USER17> This.

There is a rejection appeal process. Use it.

Of all big companies, Apple should be amenable to a straightforward explanation that sometimes simplicity is the right design, and that "adding features for the sake of adding features" is wrong.

<comment><USER18> We've had an application rejected for this reason as well. In our case, they didn't even describe what they didn't like besides "not enough functionality". Our application was quite a bit more complex, and we could prove there was demand for such an application. I get the feeling they guessed at the application's functionality based on the name and didn't really check it out (it wasn't a particularly great name).

We went through the appeals process. It was very unhelpful. I got the impression that until we responded "we have updated the application", any objections were routed to the same unreasonable person that rejected us originally who didn't care to look at the same application twice.

We ended up adding a "feature" in a completely superficial way. We took an existing feature of the application and we exposed it as a top-level menu item instead of making it appear in the context where it makes sense.

As soon as we told Apple that we'd added a feature and they could verify that there was a new top-level menu item on the first screen of the application, they approved it. It was essentially the same application that they thought didn't have enough functionality, except rearranged slightly to make the functionality obvious to a reviewer that doesn't look past the first screen.

As far as I can tell, there's a lot of pressure inside Apple to churn through reviews as quickly as possible, and the review process is getting sloppier. Things get approved when they have glaring faults, and things get rejected because they didn't make a good impression in the first few seconds a reviewer looked at it.

<comment><USER17> The first time _South Park_ was submitted to the ratings board 5 times, it got an NC-17 (to wit: patently adult material, a rating assured to destroy revenue). Then, with nothing more than a name change (the arguably far more vulgar _South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut_ ) the rating was changed to a much more market-pleasing R. Sometimes getting approval just takes a well- placed phone call amounting to "c'mon, people, don't be stupid about this."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When my son was 2, I found a free iPad app called "My Colours". It was a grid of 12 colors. When a color block was touched, a synthesized female voice read out the name of the color.

For my son, at least, it worked very well, much better than fancier (and often garish) apps, and he was even able to identify "turquoise" because of the app. When I had to reinstall my iPad, I found it was missing from the App Store. Fortunately, I found a backup copy.

I strongly suspect that the colors app was pulled for having been "too simple". If that was the case, it would seem that Apple seems to prefer bells and whistles to functionality.

<comment><USER20> I haven't heard of a case where it was removed later by apple for an issue like that. Perhaps the author pulled it down. If you aren't doing much in the app store, and just make a simple app for fun one year then it is easy to just let your $100/yr membership lapse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like you need to add a duck _. Just keep adding features till they accept it. Example: simple form that lets you take a picture of yourself, type a note about your mood, and share it on Twitter or Facebook, as well as link to the graph.

_[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/122148](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/122148)

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's the approach Apple is trying to foster. You will turn a simple app into a shitty app.

<comment><USER23> Trying to foster? No. Fostering? Yes. What Apple intends to achieve with their policies is an interesting but academic discussion. Policies, laws, and features can have all have plenty of bizarre side effects.

For instance, I'll bet ya that allowing people to share their moods on Facebook leads to measurably different and likely less accurate mood graphs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems like one of those moments when Tim Bray's 2002 sharecropper post applies:

"What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a sharecropper."

[https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm going to go in the opposite direction of everybody here and tell you your app sucks (based on what you say about it) and Apple was right. Look at it this way - A developer creates an app that ask a daily question (maybe with a reminder) and then plots the answers on a graph. That developer then release 1,000 versions of that app to the app store by simply changing the question. That app should have been a general purpose app that lets you define your own questions/frequency/etc. All you've got right now is a question, that when asked daily creates some interesting data. You need to built an app around that. You have some actual features outlined in your roadmap, why not implement at least some of those and resubmit? Oh, and I went looking for feature listings, videos, philosophy, etc, or anything about your app on your website and I got nothing. The entire website about your app is a landing page and one page that is complaining about your rejection. If your app is currently so simple that it didn't even need a single webpage maybe Apple was right....

<comment><USER26> I agree Matt. Apple has every right to reject apps that don't add any value to their ecosystem. There are probably many apps that do what this app does. The ego of the people making this is incredible, why don't you just use the existing apps if you aren't going to add value?

<comment><USER27> Which underscores the essential understanding that unlike Android, Windows, OSX, Linux, the web and others, iOS is not a _platform_ at all in a strict sense of the word. It is a proprietary technology partnership with Apple with the one and only goal of making money for Apple. If your interests aren't first and foremost to make money for Apple, then secondly to make it for yourself, go somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Unrelated to the article itself, but a friendly tip for the Hueman guys: the lack of margins on this page made it very hard to read. Not everyone browses full-screen on their 27" iMac. On any window under 1100px, the content runs into the margin on the left, which could easily be avoided with some padding: [http://cl.ly/image/2V0A021M1t0S](http://cl.ly/image/2V0A021M1t0S)

<comment><USER29> I had to scroll back down every time I moved forward a page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I honestly don't what is the big deal. It sounds like this is not a full blown rejection, it is more like a "Oh, nice idea! We could use that. Why don't you revise it a bit and resubmit": > We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can incorporate additional content and features to provide a more robust user experience.

And it also sounds like you were already aware of what is missing: > The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph views and scrubbing, ability to add media.

It think it will be a great app. I hope you get over the "rejection" notice and keep working on it. All the best for your resubmission.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why appeal to us? Appeal to Apple, through this channel: [https://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/?topic=appeal](https://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/?topic=appeal)

<comment><USER32> Apple should rename their appeals process to cutsey human words like they do "logic board","retina" etc.

The Apple Peal process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "If it's just using webviews, why does this need to be an app?"

exactly...

there is no actual reason this couldn't be a cross platform 'web app'. it would be better that way. why do you want the app on the appstore exactly?

the list of reasons given are of debateable merit the last one is probably the best, and suggests a fix. develop the app a bit further so you can justify it not being a web page...

also, why are you storing data on the user's phone? will you be using icloud or some web service to preserve it across devices? is it just cache?

<comment><USER34> I found the reasons not to be a web page very bad. There are perfect good web API's to store data on the device: [http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html](http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would suggest to add a function so you can add a personal note to each day, and sell it as a mood tracker / diary. First, it would be useful to keep track of why you were feeling bad or good on a given day by maybe a making a small not on what happen. Plus, then apple would not be able to reject it, as it would be a diary app with a graph. There are a ton of diary apps on iOS, and this one would even have a graph. Let them argue that's not novel and feature reach :)

<comment><USER36> They may reject it because there are a number of mood tracking diaries already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So far few people have addressed Apple's argument. Does this app provide valuable utility? Does it enable people to do something they couldn't do before or in a way they couldn't do it before?

There are already many mood trackers, just search the app store. This is certainly not anything new. The one thing that makes this one different from the others is that it seems to have no extra features. But that can't be their design vision, because they plan to add a social aspect and more views and editing functions. So what's special about this app in the way it stands right now?

</comment><comment><USER20> You even state that

> The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native > iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph > views and scrubbing, ability to add media. etc... And by eventually letting > people combine their data, you will be able to see how their relative > happiness aligns to other users, a neighborhood and even the world.

It sounds like you think it needs more features too. I understand wanting to release as soon as possible but this might be a good chance to add the other features YOU want.

</comment><comment><USER37> Given the app consists of two web views and a bit of background code I'm not surprised. Perhaps if they'd utilised the GUI elements Apple provides to give a native experience it would actually warrant being an app.

tbh this seems like it would be better implemented as a HTML5 mobile site that utilises the new local storage APIs. You can still promote web apps through App Store, and it seems like a more obvious route to me.

<comment><USER38> > You can still promote web apps through App Store

Really? I haven't heard about this.

<comment><USER37> Sorry, my bad. It seems I was thinking of PhoneGap, which packages HTML5 apps for mobile devices [https://build.phonegap.com/](https://build.phonegap.com/)

I believe on some Android platform (such as Amazon App Store) you can even charge for HTML5 apps, so it's not unprecedented.

However Apple app submissions requirements state you have to have sufficient functionality to warrant providing a native application. Not surprised that this code didn't make the grade, but as mentioned if they were able to make use of UI framework or put through PhoneGap could resolve the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Should have gone with Android.

I really want this app, and now they are having to spend time getting it accepted by apple, it's just going to delay an Android version.

<comment><USER40> Don't be ridiculous. There are multiple android apps that do this already, and the developers obviously don't care about Android that much otherwise they'd have gone with android first.

It's just two webviews anyway, so it should be no real effort for them to port it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The whole concept needs work. You compare each day to the previous one, but the app doesn't know by _how much_. Which leads to ludicrous results when applied to real life situations. For example you got fired, or your girlfriend left you, or your friend/relative died. What a terrible day! But then over the course of several days you slowly get over it, so your mood rises up until you reach the original level. But what does the graph show? That you're feeling much better after the traumatic event! What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, eh? The model is just plain wrong.

</comment><comment><USER42> In all fairness, I'm confused about what the app does. What do the colors represent? What is the y axis? etc.. Could insert a legend and some labels to make it more clear. But I could be wrong and the screenshots don't accurately depict the app. Also the Hueman ID is a bit clinical/sterile and I would say doesn't represent a good user experience, because it doesn't provide me with anything useful only a question mark. But again, this is from just seeing the screenshots. Look forward to downloading the app! Neat idea!

<comment><USER43> I am guessing the ID's here are just for testing or maybe changed to numbers as a matter of privacy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> A walled garden can be used to guard against bugs, viruses, spam. But when its used to curate according to somebody's idea of taste or usefulness, that's arrogance. Let the market decide.

Absolute power corrupts.

</comment><comment><USER45> I wonder - when an app rejection with a good idea happens based on it being "too simple" (and many great ideas are simple to implement), what if competition picks up the idea, adds more bloat, gets approved and steals the original's thunder, shouldn't Apple be held responsible and pay for damages?

There's probably no chance of that happening, because it's their app store, they can do whatever they want and so on. But this kind of deal is exactly why some companies feel like protecting their "intellectual property" with patents. Because the distribution networks are not open, except for the web and even if your execution is perfect, there's no guarantee you'll be the first to market, because shit like this happens. And then we've got people praising app stores, because their grandma can now feel safe, though to me optimizing for grandmas doesn't make much sense.

I view the app store model as a regression. It is useful, but only when it's optional. Android is still allowing installs from third-party sources, even though you have to click a checkbox to enable the capability, but due to current trends and seeing Android's evolution, I don't have many hopes for this feature surviving in the long run. In the end, the web is still the most open distribution platform and these big companies are trying to fix that.

<comment><USER36> Do you have an example of an app with an original idea being rejected for being too simple? That sounds like an interesting hypothetical scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Yeah, well, reject Apple yourself and put it into the Play Store.

I use a Macbook Air and multiple idevices. I don't develop mobile (yet). I'm sorry, but I find all these 'daddy Apple rejected my app' posts a bit tiring.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady It doesn't sound like you've tried appealing the ruling. This sounds like the sort of thing that would get through on appeal once you've explained why it can't have more features.

</comment><comment><USER47> "we consider simplicity to be uncomplicated - not limited in features and functionality"

I cannot believe this is an official position for a company like Apple (or any company for that matter).

My advice would be to move _away_ from native and towards the web, as opposed to baking in useless features or planning new features that rely on native capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER48> I worked for a mobile apps platform that cobbled together webkitviews and formed it into a mobile app. Quite often it was rejected because it's really just various RSS feeds.

Apple didn't reject you because they thought it was simple. They rejected you because you built it too simply.

At least toss in some Origami flips and folds.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's really your typical regulatory committee keeping up appearance and hitting their quota:

Regardless of quality or compliance with the rules, Apple's App Store review staff needs to reject a given number of admission a week. Otherwise, they're out of a job.

Think about end-of-the-day traffic tickets or city's planning and zoning... Here's a classic explanation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdi885ZdBA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdi885ZdBA) Or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration#Alleged_problems_in_the_drug_approval_process)

</comment><comment><USER50> Fuck Apple. I mean really.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been there, had an app I used daily in my job. I valued it for how fast it got me the information I needed (aviation weather) without features that I didn't need getting in the way. A few friends thought it looked useful so I put it on the store and got the same rejection. I added a couple of features that nobody uses (saving weather for later viewing) and got it through. I always suspected it was that I wanted to charge Tier 3 for it and they didn't think that was justified.

<comment><USER52> This sounds similar but different to something I did. I needed a basic calculator for work, and colleagues did too. A dead simple app, but it was free and was accepted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> That's a shame. Mood trackers are a useful tool to help tackle some mental health problems. Tacking on a bunch of stuff to get it into the app store feels sub-optimal. My current mood tracker has some features that I really don't like. [https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/moodometer/id404137652?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/moodometer/id404137652?mt=8)

When did "do one thing and do it well" become something to avoid?

</comment><comment><USER54> Assuming you haven't already, just respond to them with a well-reasoned argument why they should let it through as-is. It occasionally works.

I've done it before when they tried to reject my company's app because we were using a webview in one section and they felt it should be native. We were doing a bunch of other stuff behind the scenes though and I told them it would be cost-prohibitive to redo that whole section right then. They let it through.

</comment><comment><USER55> Not everything can be as deep as Flappy Bird.

<comment><USER56> Or the million Flappy Bird clones that Apple quickly approved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> By Apple's logic the app Everyday should not have been accepted: [http://everyday-app.com/](http://everyday-app.com/)

<comment><USER58> Apple likes you to integrate platform features though, that is heavily tied to the camera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I realise many are in the mood to dump all over apple but... really, if apple or anyone treats their app store as a store-front, it's not hard to understand how the store manager might find this application to be just adding noise.

if you think all apps should be allowed no matter what, then you are right to be bothered by their rejection of this app. if you think any store manager has some reason to filter apps, then you cant really complain.

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if it was partially rejected due to the use of 'webviews'.

<comment><USER58> Silly but this could be part of it. Apple directs people that just make an app that is a phonegap wrapper of a website to just make a website. I have seen apps be rejected for just being website wrappers or webview apps without other integration points. The fact that it doesn't tie in any services is also sometimes a factor. Integration of iCloud, GameCenter, etc always make for an easier review time.

<comment><USER6> I've submitted at least 10 apps to the app store that were just a webview wrapper, no problems. Anecdotal but, there you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Your mistake was making an iOS app. Experiments must be done on a platform that allows users to install apps themselves, like Android.

</comment><comment><USER62> This is why Apple is inferior to Android. You spend resources to develop something, and it's a crapshoot whether or not it gets accepted or stays accepted.

I can understand ordinary customers being wow'ed by Apple marketing, but why don't developers jump ship en masse at the way Apple treats them? It's not like there isn't an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER63> Add a flashlight or fart button to it. "Needs more flashlight" should be the "needs more cowbell" of our age.

<comment><USER44> Ironic: to satisfy Apple, the mecca for good design, you have to crap up your application.

<comment><USER64> Simple has two meanings. You are addressing one of them. I'd argue that the fact the app consist essentially 2 web views, the simple means 'WTF is this even an app?'.

<comment><USER44> And that is improved by adding unrelated dingles to the app?

<comment><USER64> Way to miss the point...

The simplicity is the function on the, rather the app itself. To be clear, its not what it does (or doesn't) do, it's _how_ it does it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I like the idea of this. Not only is the historic data interesting, I suspect just taking time to reflect on your days would likely improve happiness in an of itself (e.g. if you know anyone who is doing one of those 100 happy days challenge).

However, the arguments against the web are a bit flimsy IMO. Data on the web is ephemeral only if you put it in an ephemeral store. Put it in localStorage! It's highly unlikely you'd exceed some quota (usually 10mb) with the kind of data you're storing, plus user's are offered chance to expand quota usually.

Or if you want something that goes above and beyond that (or what you have with a "native app") you could integrate with Dropbox's datastore API [0] and have data available on any machines I choose to use.

[0] [https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore/docs/js](https://www.dropbox.com/developers/datastore/docs/js)

</comment><comment><USER66> So they had a submission screen and a probably blank graph. It's pretty easy to go back and add a tutorial with colorful graphics and an example graph, a few help pages describing the idea and concept, etc.. Honestly they should have just added some more filler pages rather than writing this blog entry, both are about as tough.

</comment><comment><USER67> Just wondering if you appealed and what was the response ?

</comment><comment><USER56> Considering how much crapware is on the Appstore, it's hard to believe Apple even reviews stuff anymore. You see rejections like this, and you wonder why those same rules weren't applied to basically _everything_ that comes up in a search.

</comment><comment><USER68> This seems to be a great idea. I really like everything about it, I would love to use it (even though I don't own smartphone). Too bad Apple did reject it. One sentence that made me quite happy in this article is:

"Hueman is free and anonymous, and to create that seamless experience, it needs to store data on your phone. If it was a web page on mobile safari, that data is more ephemeral."

If the Hueman developers read this: have you considered something like unhosted [0] for your application? It should be easy enough to implement.

[0] [https://unhosted.org/](https://unhosted.org/)

</comment><comment><USER69> A similar app was recently in the top chart in "productivity" section.

It's called feeltracker, and it has historical graphs: [https://www.feeltracker.com](https://www.feeltracker.com)

</comment><comment><USER70> At least they could plot their feelings of rejection on the app Apple rejected.

</comment><comment><USER71> The times when I'm unhappy, I often have no idea of the cause.

Why not add some optional questions that would drive more useful reporting if answered:

# Are you in a relationship? For how long?

# Do you have a job? Rate your performance 1-10

# Are you exercising? How often?

# Are you happy with your weight? What is your weight?

# Rate the healthiness of your diet.

# How well are you sleeping? How many hours?

There are so many more useful data points you could collect. If they're optional, and maybe hidden unless you enable them, it won't do much to over- complicate the app.

It would then be super useful for those who suffer from depression or other psychiatric illnesses, and problem solved re app store.

</comment><comment><USER72> Does it cost anything to submit an app (apart from the initial dev account)? Otherwise you could just submit it again, and hope that it gets a different reviewer. Reviews seem to be a bit arbitrary sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER73> Apple is curating a ten billion dollar marketplace [1].

Apple will error on the side of maintaining the overall quality of the entire Application selection, even if it means many very worthwhile applications are rejected.

I sympathize with huemanapp's developers, but they must realize they are competing for "virtual shelf space." I say to them; keep plugging away and good luck.

[1] [https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/01/07App-Store- Sales-T...](https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/01/07App-Store-Sales- Top-10-Billion-in-2013.html)

<comment><USER74> A shelf space analogy doesn't make sense. With a real shelf, there is scarcity. Only so many shelves can fit in the store, and only so many products on a shelf.

The marginal cost of a virtual good is zero. Apple's ability to support apps is effectively infinite.

There are over 1M apps in the App Store.

This is not about "shelf space".

<comment><USER75> There is a kind of scarcity in abundance.

When the marginal cost of shelf space approaches zero, another factor comes into play: time spent by the buyers.

With too many shelves in the store, many products will never be bought, no matter how good they are.

<comment><USER74> There are already 1M apps in the App Store.

There's already too many apps, so preventing "over choice" isn't their goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The ironic thing is that Apple is asking you to do something very Un-Apple. I imagine if you loaded the app up with "Share this with your friends!" kind of junk, they'd accept it.

</comment><comment><USER77> So... could this by any chance mean an Android port? Pretty please? :)

<comment><USER78> Given how it's (self-admitted) just two webviews and push notifications, a port should take just a week (if that) to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> A bit off-topic but is there a name for the tone of the copy on this? It reads like the current tranche of MS/Apple advertising speak. Would cult-like be going too far?

</comment><comment><USER80> "Apple sucks" and "use Android" aren't really productive responses to an article like this. Consider taking your quips to a site like Reddit.

<comment><USER81> I disagree, you don't need to say anything derogatory about Apple but saying that it is a blessing in disguise that Apple didn't let you into their walled garden when you have a much larger and open playground in Android is a very productive response.

<comment><USER82> If you want to sell your apps that large Android playground suddenly shrinks. A lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> An app like Flappy Birds will pass, but this won't? _sigh_

Reason makes me feel like they don't want you competing with an area they're going to go into.

</comment><comment><USER84> I appreciate people sharing their stories about Apple's rejection motivations. This helps other developers to avoid doing the same "mistakes". But, isn't it against the TOS we agree on when joining the Apple Dev Program, to talk about rejection reasons and even cite the feedback mails? I was under this impression, can't say that I would be sad if I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER85> Maybe not related, but is it possible that Apple does not want this app to exist because parts of it could be considered prior art for it's patent application?: [http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/126980-apple-seeks-to- scan-y...](http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/126980-apple-seeks-to-scan-your- emotions-with-new-mood-inference-patent)

<comment><USER58> Pretty recently filed on Jan 23rd, not saying this has anything to do with the OP's rejection, but it could be planned future technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> That's odd, I reject Apple for the same reason.

I joke of course, but Apple builds monopolies they have tight control over, sue for anything and basically tell everyone who doesn't like it to screw off (and they can because they have the monopoly). As much as I like their design and hardware, as far as corporate entities go, they're kind of a jerk.

<comment><USER82> Monopolies? Like there are no Google Play store and Windows Phone store (whatever it is called), nobody else makes smartphones, nobody else sells books and music online?

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> The article was interesting, but it's more interesting seeing that Apple is Hacker News favourite whipping boy now.

</comment><comment><USER88> When I was younger and struggling with issues, I did exactly this - plot my happiness on a graph. It was one of the few things that helped me get through a day, seeing that there are ebbs and flows, and for every low point there's likely a high point coming up.

This app needs to be published.

</comment><comment><USER89> Best thing that could have happened to you, given all the attention you're getting now? :-)

</comment><comment><USER90> I've published apps that were simpler than "Hello World" for iOS, if this is any indication:

[http://www.appcoda.com/hello-world-app-using- xcode-5-xib/](http://www.appcoda.com/hello-world-app-using-xcode-5-xib/)

</comment><comment><USER91> Make it live on the web. Better yet, make it live on a device. Two buttons, button presses are valid only once a day, LED confirmation, USB read-out. Make the case beautiful, done. Standard AAA Battery will live for years, data can be written to flash.

</comment><comment><USER92> I put down a sketch pad and collection view for memo taking app. It didn't get rejected.

</comment><comment><USER93> > We encourage you to review your app concept and evaluate whether you can > incorporate additional content and features to provide a more robust user > experience.

Easy - just add the ability to issue fart sounds, which has always been enough quality for Apple users.

</comment><comment><USER94> My DogeCoin price app was too simple too.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wmmk9/my_dogecoin...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wmmk9/my_dogecoin_price_checking_app_was_rejected_by/)

</comment><comment><USER95> Seems like the cheapest way to get noticed in the App Store is for your app to get rejected.

</comment><comment><USER96> I had an idea like this once: [http://lifemetric.com/](http://lifemetric.com/)

I always wanted to make an app for it, but it looks like yours is pretty nice. Just add some more features and Apple will probably accept it.

</comment><comment><USER97> Skimmed the article and the comments, thought the app seemed like a cool idea. It was when the App Store couldn't find any results for 'Hueman' that it struck me; the whole point of the article! Ha. Damn it.

</comment><comment><USER98> This pleadings with Apple make me wanna throw up. I can't make myself even read how great you are and it is not fair. The only thing not fair is you submitting it to Apple.

50 hues of gray is what this is.

</comment><comment><USER99> Just release it on android

</comment><comment><USER100> There's actually a UK citizen science project running along very similar lines: [http://www.mappiness.org.uk/](http://www.mappiness.org.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER76> It also reminds me of that episode of King of the Hill where Hank and his family join another church and they keep getting calls asking how satisfied they are on a scale of 1-10 XD

</comment><comment><USER101> How is a once a day mood tracker app not useful? Look at the apps currently in the App Store... how is this any less useful than a flashlight or any other single function application?

Fuck Apple.

</comment><comment><USER102> Been there, had that response. I got the same rejection last year and basically stopped fine tuning my app as I refused to add stuff that it didn't need.

</comment><comment><USER103> I am absolutely fascinated with this tool. I only with I had the ability to write something like it myself. I'm really satisfied others have the same thoughts.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER104> Anyways it is not wise to pour frustration on rejection publicly. Especially in this case, as there seems to have been no conversation or further appeal.

</comment><comment><USER105> You should get it working on Android -- but only so I can use it. In all seriousness, it looks like a great app, I'd keep appealing it.

</comment><comment><USER106> Don't know whether I should spoil the secret or keep it to myself, but why don't you submit again? and again. until it gets in.

</comment><comment><USER107> This just in - grass has rejected itself for being too green. This is the core feature of Apple products - their simplicity.

<comment><USER108> simplicity to use, not design.

<comment><USER107> If it's designed simple, it will be simple to use. So it's the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Just put it on Android. It looks great though!

</comment><comment><USER110> Send it to the bloggers that be as "The app Apple doesn't want you to see" and use it to your advantage.

</comment><comment><USER81> Forget Apple, make an Android app.

</comment><comment><USER111> Add something that uses the new M7 motion tracking chip and they'll approve it. :)

</comment><comment><USER112> Waiting for the Android version.

</comment><comment><USER113> this app is perfect the way it is. i'm disappointed that the pioneers of design in software are requiring you to make things less simple for some arbitrary reason.

"make things as simple as possible, but no simpler" \--Einstein

</comment><comment><USER114> This is great. I hope it eventually makes the app store. I would 100% use this.

</comment><comment><USER115> I really like the idea behind the app but we also need to follow quality criteria set by Apple team to stop non productive app being listed in appstore.

As suggested by Crazygringo, they can improve the app by including some functionality. I am eagerly waiting for this app to get approved !

</comment><comment><USER116> Is there some technical limitation to making this a web app?

</comment><comment><USER117> Apple keeps chipping away at that good will.

</comment><comment><USER118> you can port it over to android then

</comment><comment><USER119> Tap to flap.

</comment><comment><USER120> iWatch territory.

</comment><comment><USER121> I fought the same fucking battle. Just keep appealing and cross your fingers you find a reviewer who isn't a dipshit.

<comment><USER122>
        >"cross your fingers you find a reviewer who isn't a dipshit"

Now there's the kind of sentiment you can feel comfortable building a business on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER123> Its called _android_

</comment><comment><USER124> I'm not surprised since this is pretty similar to what all communication hubs are trying to do (for obvious marketing reasons). You are serious competition and they have the power to sweep you under a rug.

</comment><comment><USER125> My heavens. This is in danger of turning all the rhetoric around depression on its ear! Everyone knows happiness or the lack of it is determined by brain chemistry, not life events. A well-adjusted person feels the same whether you run them over with a car or give them a hand job.

</comment><comment><USER126> Let me be the first to reject this website for being "too shitty".</comment>


The "startup nation" is running out of steam - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21701810-startup-nation-running-out-steam-talent-search <comment><USER2> Israel has a great high-tech sector. I have enjoyed it for more than 20 years, and continue to be a part of it as a consultant. It's amazing to see how many companies are here, big and small. And for engineers, it's shocking to see just how many good jobs you can choose from. Israelis in high tech live a privileged life.

And yet, we have to remember that Israel is a small country, and that even if a large proportion of your population goes into high tech, that's still a far cry from everyone. Add to that the fact that our schools aren't pushing science and math nearly as well as they could, and I'm not hugely surprised that there are problems on the horizon, near- and long-term.

The problem would seem to be more for companies than for individual engineers. Individuals with high-tech skills will continue to be sought after. But if you're starting a company, and want to recruit talent, then the competition for such talent (already quite fierce) might well be even tougher.

The government is making a strong push for better math and CS education, to try to stem this problem. And I'd like to think that things will change, but I don't know by how much.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: Israel is apparently known by some as the "startup nation" and growth in the tech sector is growing slower than rest of economy, supposedly due to lack of trained employees.

There was another article recently saying the same thing about (I think) Spain.

<comment><USER4> The moniker "Startup Nation" owe's a lot to the eponymous book: [https://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic- Mira...](https://www.amazon.com/Start-up-Nation-Israels-Economic- Miracle/dp/0446541478/) It's a great read.

Speaking from personal experience, Israel is the only place on earth with a startup ecosystem comparable to the Valley.

<comment><USER5> >Speaking from personal experience, Israel is the only place on earth with a startup ecosystem comparable to the Valley.

Hm. So, I guess when I was starting my company, the ability to make a lot of money myself made a huge difference; I was able to turn that money into a company... (Now, of course, I understand this isn't what most people do, and after doing it myself, I understand why most people don't do it that way. This isn't how I'm going to start my next company, if I ever start a company again.)

The problem with Israel, (in my experience, which is approaching a decade old) is just that the pay there was very dramatically less, to the point where, yeah, if I had money, I might want to start a company there, sure, but I couldn't do what I did in silicon valley; I couldn't use my own labor to bootstrap the capital required to start a company, because my labor would be worth a small fraction of what it's worth in silicon valley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It makes sense. What are the prospects of non-Jewish engineers moving to Israel? The Valley depends on large amounts of immigration from all over the world, particularly Asia. I would think that most Jewish engineers who would want to live in Israel are already there by now.

<comment><USER7> Why would a non-Jewish engineer (or Jewish engineer ) not want to move to Israel, if there are job opportunities?

Why would no more Jewish engineers want to mve to Israel? There are more being born and growing up every year -- Jewish engineers are a renewable resource.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/bye-the-beloved- country-w...](http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/bye-the-beloved-country-why- almost-40-percent-of-israelis-are-thinking-of-emigrating.premium-1.484945)

People who live in a country usually know it better than foreigners, so if almost 40% of them are contemplating emigration, there are some deep economic and social problems within that society.

The last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and that was only because Israel put enormous political pressure on the US to not allow them to come to the states instead.

<comment><USER9> > The last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the > Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and that was only because Israel put > enormous political pressure on the US to not allow them to come to the > states instead.

I can't find a source for your claim the Israel put political pressure on the US to not allow Soviet Jews to immigrate. Your dates are also off by 1-2 decades, according to Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post- Soviet_aliyah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah)

Do you have a source for your claim?

<comment><USER8> >The 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah began en masse in late 1980s when the government of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders of the USSR and allowed Jews to leave the country for Israel.

Yes, the one you just linked and didn't read, at all. Literally the first sentence of the wikipedia article. The first sentence. From Wikipedia, the highest number of Jewish immigrants from The Soviet Union was in 1990. The first chart!

Further discussion of the reason for Jewish organizations in America and Israel supporting limiting the amount of Soviet Jewish immigration to the US can be found here:

[http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0016.001/\--we- are...](http://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/belin/13469761.0016.001/--we-are-not-one- american-jews-israel-and-the-struggle-for?rgn=main;view=fulltext)

I can't imagine you're a good developer or a good project contributor, since not only are you not capable of reading the documentation or doing a google search, you correct people who are right by using sources that say that you're wrong.

<comment><USER9> Sure, the highest spike was in 1990 — which is, you'll notice, not actually in the 80s — but nonetheless the article is quite clear that there was a high volume of Jewish immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union throughout the 1990s and tapering off toward the end and through the early 2000s. There were 50k immigrants in the year 2000, for example, in the chart you're referencing. Saying that the "the last major immigration to Israel were eastern european jews leaving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s" (sic) is off by a decade even if you only count the '90s as part of the post-Soviet aliyah, and more than a decade if you count the early 2000s — Wikipedia considers the entire immigration wave to be from roughly 1989 to 2006, as mentioned in the _second_ sentence of the post.

Your other ad hominem comments seem pretty absurd.

<comment><USER8> Are you a non-native speaker of english at a lower-intermediate level? Because most conversational speakers of english would be able to successfully understand that it was implied as an ongoing process, while most lower- intermediate speakers tend to focus on grammar rules mechanically while having limited comprehension of everyday usage.

Ie, most of the people who left in 1990 had already begun their applications and prepared to emigrate in 1989 or even earlier, unless you believe that the crumbling soviet bureaucracy moved at lighting speed and that it was easy for jews in central Asia to travel thousands of miles and spend potentially weeks applying for an exit visa in Moscow.

Citing wikipedia as a primary source is something that wikipedia explicitly discourages, in part because so many articles are constantly being degraded in quality by extremist political partisans: scientologists, objectivists, zionists, stalinists, neo-nazis, etc. Clearly I have a grasp of the facts of the matter, so why are you splitting hairs if not to distract from the other things I said that you have no response to.

The link I posted (of which you have said nothing, nor have you attempted a defense of why the Israeli government shut down a Finnish transit point that allowed soviet Jews to choose between the US and Israel) puts the period between 1989 and 1993. Furthermore, it provides exhaustive and nuanced evidence that the Israeli state was strongly opposed to allowing soviet jews freedom of choice. Ironically, the Israeli political mainstream is quite similar to the Soviet Union itself, in both its curtailing of human freedom, crude propaganda lies, and ugly ethno-nationalism.

It is pretty absurd that you would have this evidence but be in such a strong state of dissonance that you're not willing to contest or process them, you're only trying to block them out.

That sounds to me like a developer who ignores technical debt, isn't capable of learning new ways of thinking or disagreeing rationally, and insists on endless bikeshedding of irrelevant minutia instead of dealing with actual facts. I've known several great expat Israeli developers, and more than one of them left Israel precisely because they found that engineers and politicians with attitudes like the one I've described are destroying Israeli economic and social life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you're like me and like to click on links to the economist, you might not be able to read the full text of this article.

[http://www.geektime.com/2016/06/30/is-the-startup-nation- run...](http://www.geektime.com/2016/06/30/is-the-startup-nation-running-out- of-steam/) has some details (and looks like it was written before the economist article).

</comment><comment><USER11> Intel Israel employs about 10,000 Israelis. Many of the intel processors are designed there and they are converting a 22nm fab to 10 nm there as well.

Much of Apple's computer chip design operations are in Israel and the head of the computer chip design group is an Israeli Arab with a masters degree from Israel's Technion University.

Israeli drones protect NATO troops in Afghanistan. Germany will be leasing the newest Heron missile drones from Israel for over $600 million.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm someone who works on partnerships with startups for a large tech company.

IMO the "hard tech" companies from Israel are pretty good (it infrastructure, cloud computing, data, microprocessors, etc).

The most of the 'consumer tech' startups are kinda lame and copycat-ish imo. Waze was a weird anomaly and sparked about 100 derivative geo startups in Israel.

<comment><USER13> Israel is pretty strong in several "soft tech" \- gambling (888, playtika etc...), adtech (amobee, outbrain, taboola etc..) and fintech.

There are a few other big consumer startups of renown that aren't copycatish - viber, wix, fiverr.

<comment><USER12> Come on now... viber, wix, fiverr? Those are basically Skype, Squarespace/Wordpress, and a million other professional services marketplaces.

There's nothing unique about any of those companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We hear this lack of engineers issue lately about practically every country, either it's a story that sells so it gets copied by every local news agency or it's a global trend.

I'm guessing its something in between - a global trend (mostly caused by increase in demand) and increased hype because people like to hear about it.

</comment><comment><USER14> arelvd ovfdojh vfvkkgh ksff lffvvj dgv efif gvdvfgh dejhi fieoi oddf jueffhg efiypot fhyefftwo eflrtfedvgyb efefho0swe efgehe ytdfiu efu8werf gwrgbfg rgej gjhj oieog gfri ujgdb iedfgb uyrb he fdfh efu efdi jdefg</comment>


True? Elon Musk 2018 pay was more than next 65 highest-paid CEOs combined - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-compensation-over-2-billion-2019-5 <comment><AUTHOR> is this true?

<comment><USER2> This is over ten years and only if he significantly grows value of company. [https://ir.tesla.com/index.php/news-releases/news-release- de...](https://ir.tesla.com/index.php/news-releases/news-release- details/tesla-announces-new-long-term-performance-award-elon-musk)</comment></comment>


It's Go Time On Linux - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/its-go-time-on-linux <comment><USER2> Dealing with time on Go, whether simply unmarshalling string representations of time or handling timezone/locale converstions, is _so_ incredibly convenient. Gone are the days when I'd have to remember the difference between "%MM", "%mm", and "%m".

I have gotten incredibly spoiled in this regard, and it's incredibly painful now to deal with time in Python or (even worse) Javascript[0].

This isn't even getting at the synchronization/timing features, which Go provides amazing support for as well.

[0] My jaw hit the floor when I saw how difficult it is to get the name of a month from a Date object in Javascript: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1643320/get-month- name-f...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1643320/get-month-name-from- date)

<comment><USER3> It was one of the things I _hated_ about Go! I am entirely comfortable with the POSIX-style %Y, %m, etc. formatting and having to learn Go's silly way to do it annoyed me no end. The documentation should be much more explicit about what the "reference time" thing means for someone used to strftime. [http://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format](http://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format)

<comment><USER2> > For more information about the formats and the definition of the reference > time, see the documentation for ANSIC and the other constants defined by > this package.

I find the information at [http://golang.org/pkg/time/#pkg- constants](http://golang.org/pkg/time/#pkg-constants) very explanatory.

What do you think is unclear about the documentation?

<comment><USER3> I just didn't "get it" as I had no idea what it meant by a reference time. Normally a time is formatted like %Y-%m-%d and so on, these examples look nothing like that so I had no idea that 2006 is how they spell %Y, 01 is %m, 02 is %d, etc. If you have grown up with strptime and friends, the Go version and documentation makes literally no sense. Then it suddenly clicks ("ah! they do _that_?!") and it is perfectly obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't spent any time looking at Go because I'm pretty satisfied with Ada, but these libs do smell a bit like the Ada time handling functions which only get better through each ISO revision. Not handling dates like POSIX is nothing new, but it some of us just haven't been exposed to it. Of course, Ada would never _guess_ at a format. Blasphemy. The more you know™

[http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6.html](http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6.html) [http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6-1.html](http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-9-6-1.html) [http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-D-8.html](http://rm.ada.cx/05/RM-D-8.html)

<comment><USER5> You rarely hear about Ada on HN (sadly). What do you use it for?

<comment><USER4> I am a freelance Ada developer who is currently working on a contact management system for call centers for a small company. It's the usual array of DB access, webserver and AJAX/websockets. The product is exclusively in Ada though it relies on Freeswitch currently and has recently allowed some Python scripting for calls. The front-end is handled by Ada Web Server which is a rather good Ada HTTP library among other things. Mounds of concurrency and threading in the product back-end.

[http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/](http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" Location contains the timezone information for the time."_

So it should really be _spacetime.HereAndNow_ :P

<comment><USER7> spacetime.WhereAndWhen, because you might be representing a time in the past, somewhere else, and because most timezones aren't UTC. Good job astronomers of Britain!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ugh.. time, durations and location is enough to make anyone's head spin. Nice to see how important something so overlooked in many languages is addressed. I haven't personally had the opportunity to play with go but I like what I see.

</comment><comment><USER9> Waiting for the GoFY release.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if this is a joke. None of us have done any work on this for years (yeah, somehow I'm a maintainer for it).

I've gotten go to run on baremetal systems since then, and there have been other operating systems attempts (not to mention rsc's original kernel in go).

What exactly are you looking for?</comment></comment>