Google turns on "Download Gmail Archive" feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/settings/takeout <comment><USER2> I'm very impressed with the number of products and services supported so far. It has everything from bookmarks to location history. It even lets you choose the format for some products, and Drive in particular has some nice options. I'm glad to see Google opening this tool up.

<comment><USER3> Plot twist:

For NSA too.

<comment><USER4> Seriously, please keep the NSA comments to NSA articles. I know the NSA issue is important, but yammering on about it in every article is the same as a Bible-bashing Christian raising the topic of Jesus in every single conversation.

And I am Christian, and I do think the NSA issue is important.

<comment><USER5> I had a moment of paranoia a few months back where I thought it was concerted attempt to trivialize the issue, but then I realized it's just a way to get cheap laughs/upvotes.

<comment><USER6> Or it's a way to keep it on people's minds - that isn't mutually exclusive with having a few laughs, I guess I can see that more easily than others coming from a nation with a long history of self-deprecating and dark humour, but it's by no means a unique phenomenon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For large archives, 10GB in our case, we had issues exporting to gzip or bzip2 --it would crash before the archive was completed. Sort of annoying in that it took almost 24 hours from the start of the archive creation to the crash event. The help desk could not resolve the issue for us. Originally, we chose gzip/bzip2 formats instead of getting a series of files with zip (i.e. zip max file size is 4GB)

At end of the day, we had success choosing the zip archive format. We did not receive a series of zip files, but just one large uncompressed text file in mbox format.

Our last big data dump was down back in late December 2013, so I am not sure if these issues persist regarding bzip/gzip2 and 10GB size archives.

</comment><comment><USER8> Easy prediction: they'll disable imap access within a year.

<comment><USER9> I never really understood why anyone would want to use GMail but NOT use the web interface. I mean, it's cool that they offer it, but I don't recall it working especially well.

<comment><USER10> A lot of people have more than one email account (personal, work, school, etc.) and not all of them are Gmail accounts.

Currently, the easiest way to manage multiple email accounts at the same time is by using a standalone IMAP client. Five accounts in the sidebar that I can access with a single click, with Unified Inbox at the top!

Gmail's web interface only lets you access one email account at a time. You could have delegated accounts, but they open in a separate tab, and the whole concept of delegation only works for Gmail accounts anyway. Or you could forward everything to your Gmail account and call it a day, but some employers might have a problem with that, especially in light of Google's apparently comfy relationship with No Such Agency.

Personally, I use my Gmail address to subscribe to public newsgroups, but I wouldn't let anything private ever touch a Google server. With a standalone IMAP client, it's very easy to maintain this kind of separation without having to suffer any noticeable inconvenience.

<comment><USER11> Gmail can get mail from other accounts via pop or imap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I ran it and it gave me a zip containing an html file called errors.html with a bunch of errors and no actual emails.

<comment><USER13> Tried running it twice, all I get are emails informing me they can't do it ( [http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png](http://i.imgur.com/zlFgQX4.png) ).

<comment><USER14> This error might have come up because you have an open Gmail client session running (or another Google service), or simply that the new service is completely overloaded right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes -- just to be clear, the submission you link to occurred before Google released the Gmail export feature.

<comment><USER16> I've used the Gmail export feature weeks ago - this does not appear to be anything new.

<comment><USER17> It (gmail export) was slowly deployed to more and more accounts over the last few weeks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I wanted to download my mbox file from Gmail and reupload it at a later date to Gmail (possibly another of my accounts), I could do that without a problem, right? Or will they just be a jumble of emails, out of order or something? I suppose at the least, they won't retain their labels.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm glad they've rolled this out widely, but unfortunately, when I attempted to use it, it simply sent me a 5MB error log and not a single bit of archived data.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I'm already using gmvault, is there any advantage to downloading it directly?

</comment><comment><USER21> Anybody here tried this at all?

I tried to get a takeout with my emails several times, all I got is on 2.3MB errors.html, telling "service cannot retrieve this item" over and over again.

<comment><USER22> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The new option is great but I am still very happy with a (payware) app called CloudPull. It can automatically backup all your Google Apps data and is not limited to Gmail but also covers Drive.

[http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/](http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/)

CloudPull is OS X only. I'm sure there're are other great options to create Gmail backups independent from Google

</comment><comment><USER24> Am I missing something new? Hasn't this been in place for couple months?

<comment><AUTHOR> When they announced it, it did not support Gmail. (Or many of the other Google services)

<comment><USER25> Takeout was announced in 2011. Takeout for Gmail was announced in December 2013. Gmail has always supported POP and IMAP which are functionally equivalent to or superior to the MBOX archive format provided by Takeout, for most purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've had 4 "Failed - Network error" messages in a row.

<comment><USER27> I have twice created an archive with my Hangouts data, and the archive contained only an errors.html file explaining that Hangouts.json failed with a "Service failed to retrieve this item" message. I left "feedback" saying so. I guess we'll see where this goes.

<comment><USER27> All right, finally got a nonempty archive. Looks like it's probably complete. Seems fairly legit. However, there is one thing that confuses me so far. Looks like a lot of links get a link_target attribute that is different from the actual link:

      {
       "type" : "LINK",
       "text" : "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company",
       "link_data" : {
         "link_target" : "http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2%2F\
                          en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F\
                          American_Letter_Mail_Company\
                          &sa=D&sntz=1&usg=[alphanumeric token scrubbed]",
         "display_url" : "http://en.wikipedia.org\
                          /wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company"
        }
      }

However, links to Youtube, or Google, or any subdomain of either, have a link_target attribute identical to their display_url. In-teresting. I wonder what that alphanumeric token is. It's like how Google search results also have, rather than normal links, links to google.com/url?[a ton of URL parameters]. I assume the latter is so they can gather data about what URLs are clicked in the search results, or possibly pasted elsewhere, and conceivably to discourage scraping. And as for this?

Perhaps it's a kludge for Google chat clients, which need to parse URLs (they do something special with Youtube links) and might be thus freed to do it stupidly. Perhaps Google wants to know what people do with their downloaded Hangout archives. Perhaps Google wants to know what people do with Hangout history in the browser, and they've changed the links in that archive, and then they just leave it that way in the exported format. --Turns out Hangout history in the browser has exactly those links... I'm guessing it's the last one. Well, at any rate, at least it's easy to ignore that field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this is Google's half hearted/half assed attempt at allaying the fears of those concerned about 'what Google might do next'. As a lot of you who have tried to export out have seen, this does not work satisfactorily or does not work at all! (See other's experiences in this thread).

I myself tried to export gmail contacts out and found it does not work as expected and does not work at all for groups. Nor does it export full data in vc, like contact photos. Why not? It's supported in the file format so why not add it?

Seems like they're making the fixing of export-out bugs a low priority. So low that its not even working at all for some. To me all this seems like deliberate negligence.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm getting "Service failed to retrieve this item."

For every item I tried to export.

</comment><comment><USER30> I hope it will one day include my YouTube (favourites) - as I still get an empty result for archiving my YouTube profile. It requires Google+ to access that now, from what I've tried to research on it.

</comment><comment><USER31> What can you do with the downloaded mail archive?

Would it be possible to load/import it into Thunderbird and get to view all the same folders as in Gmail now for example?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'll just ask the NSA for mine ;-)

<comment><USER33> Who do you think they created this feature for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is this new? I'm pretty sure it's been around in some form for a couple of years at least.

<comment><USER35> Gmail was announced several weeks ago (maybe December?) as coming to Takeout, and last time I checked I didn't have it enabled, but now I do. It's by far my biggest file, my last export of all the services I was able to download was ~100MB, but this is at 3.5GB and climbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This has been true since Dec. See: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of- your-...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-gmail- and-google.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I just requested an archive and I will be surprised if I get it any time soon. Gmail - 5GB, Drive - 3 GB, G+ Photos - 1.5 GB - this is going to be one huge zip file !!

<comment><USER38> Just as an FYI Takeout's zip files are limited to 2GB (for compatibility reasons) so you'll actually get a couple zip files, if you want just one file you need to pick one of the other archive formats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Perhaps preparing to turn off 'IMAP access' feature?

<comment><USER40> Not likely. You can only create a backup once every 24 hours which would be useless for importing into a mail client.

<comment><USER41> I think the idea here is that now they could turn off IMAP and not be accused of lock-in, whereas IMAP used to eh the only way to liberate your email.

They won't turn off IMAP of course, because they would anger way too many mobile users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It might be a coincident. But since I started creating an archive I do not get any more email to that account. And it already takes some hours.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is there anyway to download using wget or curl? Google chrome isn't cutting mustard. After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.

<comment><USER44> > After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.

That sounds more likely to be an issue with your local storage (4GB being the limit for files on a FAT-formatted hard drive, IIRC). Though on the other hand, somebody still using FAT in this day and age seems a fairly unlikely explanation too :S

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> They took their time but this does look like the right way to do it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised google are making it _easier_ to escape.

</comment><comment><USER46> 1.4MB file. I don't think it worked lol

</comment><comment><USER47> You should create backup every month...

</comment><comment><USER48> Wasn't this there before?

</comment><comment><USER49> Useful but you could do it with IMAP already.

</comment><comment><USER50> anyone else getting just a zip of error.html which contains whole bunch of "Service failed to retrieve this item." for all emails?

<comment><USER51> Or worse: system "got" 7 gigs, still in progress, refresh page, 7 gigs disappear.

<comment><USER50> now I'm getting this

        Sorry you have have reached the maximum number of archive
        creations allowed per day. You can try again tomorrow.</comment></comment></comment>


Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps - <AUTHOR> http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps.html <comment> V-2 [http://i66.tinypic.com/ax1kid.png](http://i66.tinypic.com/ax1kid.png) \- that's how this blog looks like on my (not enormous) monitor.

Tiny font, margins 200% (!!!) the width of the actual content. What's up with that? : )

Why do people who talk about UI the most design their pages to have the readability of WalMart receipts?

What's the point of buying a 24" or 27" monitor if they insist on only using one third of screen estate?

Sorry about the rant, it's just one of my pet peeves, plus it wouldn't grind my gears so bad if the article itself didn't seem very interesting

<comment><USER2> ctrl++

<comment> V-2 I figured I can zoom on pages, but that's beyond my point - good design means settings are sensible out of the box, by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very valid points addressed in this essay, I wonder if OS and messengers vendors will ever take that into account</comment>


Google Adjusts Political Posture With Sponsorship Of Conservative Conference - <AUTHOR> http://cpac2012.conservative.org/sponsorship/2012-sponsors/

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't read too much into this. A large number of companies split there political capital between the parties, to 'hedge their bets'.

<comment><USER3> But don't you think that this practice is indicative of a larger problem -- that regardless of which major party is in power, corporations can't lose?

<comment><USER4> Ah, but corporations can lose — if they don't contribute to the right politicians.

Politicians should be required to wear NASCAR uniforms, so that we would know who owns them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> CPAC isn't just a regular Republican thing. It's super super right wing. It's John Birch Society-level wingnuts.

</comment><comment><USER6> More info here: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/google- sponsoring-c...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/google-sponsoring- conservative-political-conference-co-hosted-by-tea-party.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any evidence that they haven't sponsored this event in the past?

</comment><comment><USER8> According to the article, it sounds like they are doing this to push Google+ .</comment>


Show HN: A web-based client for all your files in the cloud - mickael-kerjean https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/nuage <comment> mickael-kerjean OP here: I started this project as I needed to manage and edit files regardless of their location. It's under AGPL, and you can self host it on your own server but a demo is available on my own server: [https://nuage.kerjean.me](https://nuage.kerjean.me)</comment>


Should California Spend 4B Gallons of Water on Six Endangered Fish? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/04/california-spend-4-billion-gallons-water-fish/

<comment><USER2> Argh. I am so sick of this PR line about the fucking fish from the farmers and conservatives. I'm very disappointed to see Wired framing the story this way.

I am not a big fish lover. I don't personally care about the Delta Smelt. But it's going extinct because farmers took up so much of the freshwater supply for so long and then screamed whenever any water was diverted. You know, California also has a multi-billion dollar freshwater fish industry. The Delta Smelt is important not because it's such an amazing fish but because it's a good proxy for the viability of our salmon fisheries and others like trout.

This sort of zero-sum thinking is at the root of our environmental and political problems. We're playing beggar-my-neighbor with increasingly scarce resources instead of saying 'look, we have multiple stakeholders here with a variety of economic interests, and ultimately we are all in this together.' It's very depressing >:-(

<comment><USER3> I agree there is lots of misinformation on this issue. But how is it not a zero sum issue? Either the water goes to the farms or to the fish. No matter how much we talk, hold hands or sing kumbaya we can't have both.

BTW - I think the underlying problem is pretty clear: water is being allocated by a broken and unresponsive legal/regulatory system. It needs to be replaced with a market so water goes to it highest and best use. Hopefully this can help restore some sanity to our collective decision making.

PS - At a conservative $500 an acre-foot that's $6 million for six fish!

<comment><USER2> Because a functioning ecosystem benefits everyone. As someone else pointed out, fish swimming upstream to spawn deposit nutrients from the ocean that help to replenish the land.

On market solutions, they can work in many cases but they're not a panacea. For example, it may be economical for golf course owners to keep using a lot of water because they can make fat money from charging expensive green fees, but that doesn't mean that watering golf courses is more economically efficient over the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the ways I like to do this evaluation is calculate how much the water would cost if desalinated. @$0.50/m^3 (modern price for reverse osmosis desalinated water at scale, based on pricing from Singapore desalination costs on a 25 year committed contract of a design-build-run factory) - 4B gallons = 15 million cubic meters.

So we're talking $7.5 million dollars, which, in the big scheme of things, doesn't sound like a lot of money when you are thinking about endangered fish, and, more importantly, a healthy ecosystem for the _other_ fish that are in that environment. In fact, it sounds kind of minuscule to me.

Note -to those that would argue you can't take desalinated water from the ocean, and deliver it to the appropriate places for the fish @ $0.50/m^3, you are right. But what you _can_ do, is deliver that water to residential homes and industries on the coastal area, and offset it by diverting the water that feeds into those coastal reservoirs at the source, so everything balances out.

<comment><USER5> Using the same metrics, it would cost about $3.70 in water to produce a lb of beef which is more than that same beef would sell for wholesale.

<comment><USER4> Which is one of the reasons why we don't grow beef from desalinated water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did you know you can eat fish? Or you could, if Central Valley growers hadn't killed them all.

Did you know that, before they were all dead, migratory fish were an important method of nutrient transport from oceans to inland ecosystems?

Did you know that fishing is an industry that employs plenty of people, when the fish haven't been driven to the brink of extinction?

All true facts.

The typical M.O. of American business and industry is to drive a species right to the edge of extinction and then let some minor weather event finish the job. That's what's happening here.

<comment><USER7> > The typical M.O. of American business and industry is to drive a species > right to the edge of extinction and then let some minor weather event finish > the job. That's what's happening here.

Brilliantly put.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not that this is a simple answer politically, but every time I see an article about whether we should use water on almonds[1] or alfalfa[2] or six endangered fish, I wish we would just price water more appropriately, and let more valuable uses of water win out over less. Wouldn't solve this particular issue, but a more appropriate price for this decision would at least help focus minds on what exactly is the tradeoff.

This sort of thing: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/business/economy/the- price...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/business/economy/the-price-of- water-is-too-low.html)

[1] [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/_10_percent_of_california_s_water_goes_to_almond_farming.html)

[2] [http://gizmodo.com/seriously-stop-demonizing- almonds-1696065...](http://gizmodo.com/seriously-stop-demonizing- almonds-1696065939)

<comment><USER9> Pricing water appropriately would be great, but there's more to this issue than that. In a nutshell: what is the value of keeping a fish species from going extinct? That's a policy question requiring public debate.

<comment><USER10> The public debate has already come and gone. The law is written. The fish wins.

<comment><USER11> Maybe everyone should just move out of California. Or perhaps they could all just euthanize themselves? That would save a lot of water. Certainly saving six fish is far for important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The headline sensationalizes a bit. It's not the 6 fish that are at issue, it's the balance between human activities and ecosystem degradation that we as a society are willing to accept. The Endangered Species Act has saved dozens of beaches and wetlands in Texas from being overrun by oil and gas development. Often a few fish or frogs were the only thing standing in their way!

<comment><USER13> Wait, how is that a useful way to think about this at all? _Right now_ we are talking about six fish. In what way are they not at issue?

<comment><USER14> I don't know, they might hold the cure to cancer... We destroy our ecosystem at our own peril.

In this time of drought, this seems like a no-brainer, but I would rather spend water on fish in an actual river (where tens of millions of other creatures live) than for cattle or almonds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not six endangered fish species, it's six actual fish... of a species where the vast majority are in the Sacramento not the Stanislaus.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. This entire argument is just absurd. Should be bulldoze San Francisco in order to save 4 spiders? There are people who would. Yet some starving kid and nobody cares.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If it prevents 4 billion gallons of water from going towards growing alfalfa in the middle of a desert, then yes, I am entirely in favor of spending 4 billion gallons to save 6 fish.

</comment><comment><USER10> How much water should California spend on golf lessons for children? Or outdoor swimming pools in which nobody every swims?

I can think of much greater wastes of water than trying to save an endangered species. If nothing else it allows one river to continue being an actual river for another year. Come what may, the farmers will still be physically alive next year.

<comment><USER11> A swimming pool doesn't use much water. It takes about 1 shower's worth of water to keep one filled each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 6 fish or green lawns. I'll have to think about it...

</comment><comment><USER18> Doing the conversions, they want to flush 651,702,863 gallons of water per fish. That's nearly 4 billion gallons of water for 6 fish.

<comment><USER2> This is bullshit. We've been diverting some water flow each year to safeguard a population of what used to be thousands of spawning fish. But as the fish population has come under greater and greater pressure, the population of the fish species in question has fallen to 6, so for all practical purposes it has now gone _instincts_ EDIT extinct (sorry) while people have been arguing over how little water it can get by with.

Stop over-simplifying complex issues. It doesn't help anyone.

<comment><USER18> I looked up and did the conversions because I had no idea what a foot acre was. I thought other folks would be interested as well. I expressed no opinion on whether it was a worthwhile endeavor one way or another.

I'm personally not a fan of the 1.1 trillion gallons used for almonds while they pull water off restaurant tables (yeah, that'll work), but I didn't think that had any place here either.

<comment><USER2> BTW I'm sorry for my tone, I can see you were trying to contribute to the discussion. But as you can guess, this is an issue I care about and I have felt quite frustrated with simplistic comaprisons like gallons-per-fish that make for eye-catching statistics but don't really aid understanding of the situation. I didn't mean to suggest you were being dishonest and am sorry that I went off on you as I did.

<comment><USER11> The population of this fish hasn't fallen to 6. This is about 6 instances of a particular fish, not the final 6 instances. I am interested in the outrage over wind power in California. The Condor is killed by windmills, yet the environmentalists keep demanding windmills. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club would bulldoze a city to save a endangered rat but say nothing about the danger of windmills.

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358724)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone put the amount of water into perspective?

<comment><USER18> 4 billion gallons of water to save 6 actual fish.

<comment><USER20> Is 4 billion a lot? that's like 1/2 a day's flow of the Mississippi.

edit:

Ah, it looks like water there is around $1000, per acre foot. 12,000 acre feet, so 1.2 million. 200k per fish sounds pretty steep, but it looks like there are other benefits.

edit 2:

looks like Nestle pays about 30 bucks per acre foot. So that's only 60k per fish.

<comment><USER21> I hate when they throw numbers around without scale. I'd have the same reaction if the question was 400M gallons, or 40M. It sounds like a lot, I guess.

But if it's only $60K per fish and this is some particularly great way of preserving them or rekindling an ecosystem, maybe that's a great deal. Or maybe it's off by an order is magnitude, in either direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER23> no, we should spend it to grow a 2M lb of almonds, a $12M at retail. $12M is the peanuts ... err... almonds we're ready to finish an ecosystem for. Our brain has long way to go in order to develop any semblance of intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER24> If they do this I am going to personally go over there and catch those fish. And kill them.

<comment><USER25> Please visit the region's golf courses immediately afterwards and kill the grass while you're there.

<comment><USER26> The golf courses are just a distraction. They use nothing compared to the farming.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. But since golf is a rich person's sport, it plays into the class warfare rhetoric so enjoyed by leftist political groups. It's imagery and grandstanding rather than rational reasoning. How about uprooting the marijuana crop? Same for almonds? How about deporting the several million illegal immigrants? Certainly they're using a lot more water than would be required to save some fish. The environmental impact of millions of additional people certainly has more impact than the golf courses. We can't say that though can we? Doesn't fit the approved politics. So instead we'll revert to rich people are bad with their pesky golf courses and showering habits.

<comment><USER27> Instead of proactively ranting politically, why not look at what the state water board says itself?

"Socio-economic measures such as lot size and income – Areas with higher incomes generally use more water than areas with low incomes. Larger landscaped residential lots that require more water are often associated with more affluent communities. Additionally, higher income households may be less sensitive to the cost of water, since it represents a smaller portion of household income."

[http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/progr...](http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/drought/conservation_reporting_info.shtml)

Seems to suggest the exact opposite of what you're talking about re: immigrants and golf courses. Also, no one is being silenced or hushed here, so the persecution complex seems a bit misplaced.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What does my Twitter mashup need to get popular in 8 days? - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitterbowl2009.com/ Next we were planning on adding an integration to tweet live from this page, and fixing some CSS stylings. But we're open to suggestions :) <comment><USER2> Maybe adding some more original content to a better designed page?

Not to be rude or anything, but there isn't anything really original. You've just taken two widgets, stuck them on a page with a repeating background, and slapped an ad in the middle.

It would have been cooler to use the API and create a more interesting interface. (Maybe tweets falling down in little footballs, although I would find that pretty obnoxious more than useful)

<comment><USER3> Cleveland isn't even in the Super Bowl.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was trying to avoid copyright issues, so that's my own picture (I lost my Heinz Field ones :( )

But yea, I think I'm going to take down the picture. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a note, if you don't want a letter from the NFL; Take _your_ mentions of 'super bowl' off. They've even cracked down on some local bars and such that advertise 'watch the super bowl here' to make them say 'watch the big game here'.

It's ridiculous I know, but just passing it on.

<comment><USER5> That can't possibly have a legal basis. Two words is too short to copyright, patents don't apply, so you're left with trademark.

I didn't think a company can come after you for using their trademark to refer to the product the trademark covers.

<comment><USER6> Oh, they can come after you, and it'll probably cost you a lot to defend your position, even if they're wrong and you're right. They win because they're rich and you're poor.

What matters for the company is that you just stop doing what they don't like, not that a real judge in a real court with real laws agree with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't follow football, so I don't know about _getting_ popular. But if you want to hold onto the popularity you might want to generalize it, allowing someone to watch any two search terms, while keeping a landing page pre-filled with the football teams.

I would move the ad to the right, putting the two content columns closer together. It's distracting. Replacing it with AdSense might be a good idea, as you've got a lot of text to allow automated targeting of ads.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find that solving a problem people have is an excellent way to increase uptake of software.

</comment><comment><USER9> A less obnoxious design would help.

</comment><comment><USER4> Send it to sports center/ESPN. Send it to Sports Illustrated. Send it to your local papers, AP, etc. It's not that this is a bad idea, poorly implemented, or poorly designed, it's fine. It just has limited audience and lifespan. Slap some ads on it and get it out there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better CSS.

</comment><comment><USER10> what does it do?</comment>


Ask PG: do you want HN to be a general news site or not? - <AUTHOR>

Hi Paul,
I know you wrote the HN guidelines specifying 'whatever hackers find interesting' is appropriate. However people take this two ways, either:
A. Whatever gets upvotes is OK, even if a large chunk of the articles on HN are about suicide bombers, the TSA, political leaks, etc and duplicate existing sites like Reddit.
B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the general population - belong on the front page.
IIRC you appealed for people to submit Scheme stories a while ago after an influx of new users came to visit, so I'm hoping for 2) to be your answer. If so, is there anything we as a community can do, asides from flagging articles (which we're already doing), to stop HN further becoming a general purpose news site? <comment><USER3> I think about HN like an editor would about a magazine. Stories about bees or Wikileaks or the TSA are sometimes appropriate. Maybe once a week or month. They are not and nor should they be automatically disqualified, I just don't want to see too many of them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Leave it the way it is! If hackers find it interesting it'll get upvoted. For example, I upvoted the bee story the other day. It was a really interesting article and I don't think my wife, for example, would give any shits about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a reason you don't use Reddit for these stories? They have heaps of articles about bees, the TSA, and wikileaks.

<comment><USER5> What's the HN reader's perception of the Reddit vs HN community when it comes to articles about bees / TSA / wikileaks?

Do we think we have more interesting commentary? (e.g. is that why we post those articles here?)

<comment><USER6> The commentary here has always been a lot better than reddit for the large majority of stories. Reedit has its place because you can custom tailor it to what you want to see and the best comments sorting helps with seeing a few good comments. That community is a lot more hostile and likely to digress into a pun comment chain though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My guess would be 'no' but when a subject is popular you'll see a cluster of articles around it. You can't please everybody _all_ the time in a community this size so your best weapons to counter any negative effects that you perceive are in order the 'submit' link and the voting arrow on those articles that you think are great, and as a final resort for things that you think are off-topic or spam the 'flag' link.

They've worked pretty good so far and it is neat to see how effective some minor tweaks have been in sending the 'front' page in the right direction.

The most important page on HN is not the homepage however, it's page #2 of the new submission list, that's where you might still be able to rescue an article that you think does not get the attention that it deserves.

You may want to really consider submitting more interesting stories, 50 or submissions over 4 years is not a whole lot. If _everybody_ that feels like you do would post interesting articles instead of 'Ask PG' stuff about the perceived quality of the site that quality would go up quickly.

</comment><comment><USER8> flag articles as appropriate and upvote things you like.

edit: though, i admit i'd like to see downvotes on submissions, too, just to see how that would work out here. perhaps two front page lists for an experiment. one that shows the results with downvotes counted, one without.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but alas there's now enough new users on HN who upvote general purpose news to the front page that flagging doesn't work anymore.

Example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043841>

<comment><USER8> this was also the case in the election cycle. tons of political stuff that got popular and highly voted didn't go anywhere until (i think) a mod made an executive decision

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed as a "Live Bookmark" in Firefox, which links right to the story URLs (not the discussions), so sometimes I'll go a few days just reading the stories, not upvoting/discussing anything, all the while thinking, "Jeez, there hasn't been anything _good_ on HN lately."

Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN- worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the discussion of an article.

My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi- regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like 3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.

<comment><USER10> Actually the decay rate is set the other way, right? The Ask/Show/Tell stories get whacked sooner. Can't remember exactly why though.

It occurs to me that any story that takes a long time to consume -- say a long TED talk -- has a built-in disadvantage to a story that can be quickly consumed. That's because of the way the decay rate works.

Ideal HN-bait story? A long-ish story with several technical-looking drawings, charts, and graphs, all around some flame-bait brand/fanboy thing like Apple or Google, loaded with personal drama that involves some famous tech person. If it has some technical googledegook or obscure jargon, all the better.

I don't mean that as a criticism of HN, just trying to flesh out what commonalities I'm noticing. Seems like that would be a first step to critiquing site. For all I know, this is exactly the kind of story pg wants to see. Beats me.

EDIT: This idea of trying to come up with the silliest hn article title in order to demonstrate community trends was so interesting to me that I followed up with a HN Contest <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048844>

<comment><USER9> Yep, HN is currently set up so that the Ask/Show/Tell stories decay faster, which just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like there used to be so many more of those posts, but it's really that there are more _now_ and they just rarely show up on the frontpage (which is probably the only thing that most people look at).

I think you're right about the HN-bait stories -- in fact, I have a feeling that a number of people tend to upvote sensational stories (actually, just the titles) without even reading them, which makes the problem even worse.

<comment><USER10> I've noticed in myself a trend: I'll read the first few graphs and then, once I figure out whether I agree with the author or not, either ditch the whole story or just go upvote it.

I assume other people do the same. It's not a good thing to do.

I think the site would be much more useful if it were just Ask/Tell/Show HN stories with some kind of meta filtering on top. How do I find a cofounder? What's the best way to measure traction? How do all these startups get so much media attention? Is there some way to navigate from those questions to all the discussions about it that we've had on HN? If so, and if you could do that with a 100 startup-related issues, it'd be a hell of a more useful site than all the gossip and drama that we end up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm definitely hoping for that the community (not just Paul Graham - <USER2> should he, regardless of how much I/we respect him, dictate direction) drifts towards A (as it has recently). Lets put it this way: you're never going to be skilled at anything if you stick only to things that hackers (our definition of it) find interesting, and not the general population? If you imagine a Venn diagram of,

      (news for us) V (news for the general population)

You'd still stick to just the very left? You'd be leaving out fair amounts of science, mathematics, arts, communication. That means that you'd be biased but more importantly, _limited_. Why should you ever want that?

<comment><USER12> Is HN the only place you get news and information? It is one of the few places (specifically community sites) I can get news relevant to programming and startup culture. That's not to say there is no place for some of the stuff further to the right, but maybe not stuff we might find by going to cnn.com. The lack of "Sub-HNs" means that if we want to keep HN's utility in terms of sifting info and news on the internet, we have to keep a tight focus.

<comment><USER11> Let me clarify (I'm being down-voted for stating my honest opinion which is in itself quite sad. I did not troll, nor was I disrespectful): I never said we should talk about the whole scope.

I certainly do not want to read news that would be to the far right of that diagram. But there are a number of soft skills you do acquire from sometimes leaning on the intersection between "hacker news" and just "news". I don't believe we should limit HN just to the very left because we'd miss those. That being said, this is HN and I don't ever want to come here for CNN content - that's why CNN.com exists.

<comment><USER13> I think you are being down-voted because your statement seems to imply that a person could not get the other news from anywhere else. I would like to see HN as just or predominately the far left of your diagram. I see news about everything everywhere, but I highly value the niche I see here and cannot find anything like it anywhere else. I'd like to see it not diluted.

FYI -- I did not down-vote your comment. I rarely ever down-vote anything on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What differentiates hackers from the general population? Is it perhaps above average intelligence, a higher level of curiosity, maybe tinkers, and/or possibly individuals who are interested in all sorts of interesting stuff?

If that is roughly the definition, then I suppose there would be general news but of a novel, or intellectually interesting nature.

If, on the other hand, by hacker you mean programmer, and by non general news you mean only news related to programming, wouldn't that be slightly too narrow?

I think technology news are dominant here, but the variety now and then I think is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> You are making a false dichotomy. A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.

On the contrary. Assuming the vast majority of HN are indeed "hackers", and that we do not just blindly upvote, then a post will get upvoted iff hackers find it interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> 'A) and B) are NOT mutually exclusive.'

That's correct. B is a subset of A. The TSA, bees, and wikileaks are undoubtably interesting to many people, not specifically hackers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the wording of A and B. Stories that are getting upvoted by the hackers here (A) are by definition stories that hackers find interesting (B).

<comment><AUTHOR> Read B) again.

'B. Things that specifically Hackers find interesting - as opposed to the general population - belong on the front page.'

Note the word 'specifically' and the phrase 'opposed to the general public'. I'm a hacker and I like pizza, however pizza is not a thing specifically Hackers find interesting.

<comment><USER17> Exactly.

An article about the economics or business of pizza, or someone obsessed with making great pizza (like this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz91GfoZ-Zs> ) might be considered interesting enough to merit going on HN.</comment></comment></comment>


Things I wish I knew about Stripe - <AUTHOR> http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2350 <comment><USER2> What we learned

* You can't change the currency of a Stripe customer.

* Stripe won't transfer US Dollars into a UK US Dollar accounts. We set some up with our bank only to find out later Stripe won't do it. So we have US Dollars => British Pound conversion cost.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, the documentation is thorough about this kind of stuff, but you have to know to look for it (and sometimes the only way to learn is the hard way).

See [https://stripe.com/docs/payouts#supported-accounts-and- settl...](https://stripe.com/docs/payouts#supported-accounts-and-settlement- currencies) for example.</comment></comment>