Show HN: A better way to find films to watch on Netflix - <AUTHOR> http://goodfil.ms/films/on_netflix

<comment><USER2> I'm not looking at this very deeply (on phone), but I think this does not make a good landing page. My impression of the copy is "sync _what_ queues?" I have a Netflix queue; I don't want to have another one that needs to be synced with it. It sounds like it's creating a problem I don't have. There's nothing that explains the benefits of GoodFilms to people who aren't already users (like the front page does). Netflix already shows me "new" and "popular" films, which is not very useful anyway.

I suggest that if a user is not logged in, show something that focuses on what makes GoodFilms useful and that you can use your NetFlix queue on it instead of having to make another one. You can just say that you can browse on-Netflix films specifically; taking up a bunch or screen real estate with what amounts to an example of that does not explain it any better.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The landing page leaves much to be desired.

I've read over it a few times and I still have no idea what your service does or why I would want to use it.

Please consider revising your copy to focus on the benefits you're providing to me. What problems are you solving for me? Why is using GoodFilms going to make my life easier or better?

Good luck to you. Congrats on launching and I hope you do well with this.

Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't sign in without Facebook/Twitter.

Pass.

I wonder what the overlap between Facebook / Twitter / Netflix is and how much of the potential audience for a service like this is being neglected?

<comment><USER5> Ditto. I don't have a Facebook account. I kind of have a Twitter account but

1- I use it so little that I would have to look up my credentials and that's a pain

2- I will never sign into a new / unknown website with Twitter for fear that the website would start tweeting nonsense on my behalf.

<comment><USER6> With regards to #2, doesn't Twitter auth include permissions so most non- spamming sites shouldn't even have permission to tweet nonsense on your behalf? Or am I misremembering? (As it turns out, the only time I ever used the Twitter auth was about a year and a half ago or so, I think.)

With regards to #1, hilariously that's one of the problems that this sort of single-sign-on is supposed to solve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I would _love_ to have is the ability to "hide" movies.

Often when I'm looking for movies to watch, I'll go through the process of looking it up on RT, if what I see there makes the decision that it's some direct to DVD crap, then I want to hide it forever.

In Netflix I've had to resort to giving movies 1 star ratings, but I'd love it if a site would just allow me to HIDE things, because sometimes I also just want to hide a good movie that I don't want to rewatch.

<comment><USER8> Err, are you using Netflix through the website? I see a big "not interested" button right next to the star rating widget...

<comment><USER7> I use iPad / Boxee and I haven't seen the button.

I'll install Silverlight and try out the web site to see if it's there.

It might be yet another feature that Netflix Canada is missing (like instant queue).

<comment><USER9> Netflix Canada definitely has a Not Interested button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice, though a couple of things immediately jump out:

First, no https. I think it's something you owe your less technical users.

Second - no non-social way to sign up. Personally, I find it annoying when I can't use simple email/username+password login. I don't really want to give up my entire social graph+data just to try something out. I realize this might be necessary for your business model, but you can offer me the option to add my social data later on, and I will if I like your service.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love this site, I use it all the time. My feature request would be for the site to recommend films for me to watch next. Sure you can see what friends are rating, but I don't have any (friend me? <http://goodfil.ms/user/4221> ). And sure you can use the "find films" feature <http://goodfil.ms/explore> However, both of these lack a "based on your ratings we think your going to love Memento" or a "sure lots of people loved the Avengers, but your not going to like it"

Nevertheless, I will continue to use this site as a way to catalog all of the films I see and how much I liked them, and IMO there is no better service out there for this purpose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. And you should have a new follower as of me, now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A question, what does the "watch again" rating matter for? I can't watch films multiple times, if I've seen it once I will never enjoy watching it again, but I'm concerned if I mark 0 on "rewatchability" that will affect the display of similar films?

Also, I've signed in and synced my Netflix account and it's still listing American Netflix films under "Recent Releases on Netflix". Might be worth excluding films that aren't available in my area (UK)

<comment><USER13> Protip: set up <http://tunlr.net/> and use the American Netflix without a VPN.

<comment><USER7> Thank you! I've been a Canadian Netflix subscriber for a long time now, and I've been thinking of dropping it because the Canadian Netflix is a wasteland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://instantwatcher.com> doesn't need to connect your account.

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI, if you have the IMDB ID for a movie, then you can link to Rotten Tomatoes using that IMDB ID.

Using the IMDB ID number, "0079501", you may access the Rotten Tomatoes Mad Max page using the following URL: Mad Max: [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=007950...](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=0079501)

I know you probably can't display the rotten tomatoes score, but it would be interesting to have that data internally.

I challenge anyone to find a movie with an RT score below 40% or IMDB score below 4/10 that was worth watching.

<comment><USER15> easy: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367085/>

<comment><USER7> It was a comment to the goodfil.ms guy, because they link to imdb not rotten tomatoes, and it's trivial to also support rotten tomatoes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing that bothers me about most movie recommendation apps is that there is no way to filter movies by their rating. As far as I know, even IMDB doesn't have this feature.

I like watching movies with my family and its hard to find good pg or pg-13 movies to watch. The family section on most sites is filled with animated movies so if you are looking for a non-animated family movie you're out of luck.

I really hope someone out there is working on an app that gets you the best movies to watch that are safe to watch with young kids and family.

<comment><AUTHOR> My uncle pointed me to the BBFC site, apparently their database is the bomb. We've considered integrating with it for Goodfilms.

They've got an iphone app too, if that helps.

edit: oops, the link: <http://www.bbfc.co.uk/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always find it difficult to come up with star ratings because I don't remember what ratings I've given to other things. I'd rather have a "rank in order of preference", or pairwise rank ("Did you like this more or less than..."). You can convert ranks into scores by looking at their position along a (probably Gaussian) probability distribution. Instead of having 1 to 4 stars you have -2 to 2 sigma.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't currently subscribe to Netflix but it seemed pretty user friendly before.

Amazon on the other hand is a totally different animal. I find Amazon's search for Prime (free) movies incredibly challenging. This kind of tool would add far more value to their system and is probably the only way I would browse if it were available.

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome design / interface. I saw this initially a few weeks ago and I'm really starting to come around to how useful it is.

</comment><comment><USER20> Loved it overall.

Would be great if there's an IMDb link to the movie in the details view page.

<comment><USER7> I saw the IMDB link.

Add the end of any description: Read more on External IMDB External Wikipedia

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I use this site quite a lot, it's very useful. Would be great if it had Love Film integration.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not surprised, but yet, i'm somewhat disapointed that it doesn't take into account your country to filter netflix releases, it looks like a cool site but it's not as useful to people on other countries.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is really great, but I think people would benefit from linking their Netflix accounts earlier in the process. I didn't realize what I needed to do for a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why do I have to log in with a Facebook or twitter account when this is for Netflix? is there no way to just have a goodfilms account and then sync my Netflix?

</comment><comment><USER25> The Find Films tab is awesome. Well done, guys; will be spreading this around to my friends :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Agree with the others. No FB or Twitter, so can't try it out :(</comment>


Begin with learning Android or iOS? - <AUTHOR>

I am web programmer(LAMP stack) & 3x entrepreneur and planning to take a break from work to learn mobile dev.
Which mobile dev. shall I learn for next 3-4 months? Android or iOS? My end goal is build some mobile-first products in future.
Although, I will be hiring experienced folks to build these products but I prefer building working prototypes before taking up any business idea full time.
If possible, also suggest some good resource to learn whatever framework/OS you suggest. <comment><USER2> I would start with iOS. With each of these paths, you will be ready to build your first project.

 _Books_

[http://www.amazon.com/Objective-C-Programming-Ranch-Guide- Gu...](http://www.amazon.com/Objective-C-Programming-Ranch-Guide- Guides/dp/0321706285/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1370308515&sr=8-3&keywords=big+nerd+ranch)

[http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition- Guides/d...](http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition- Guides/dp/0321821521/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370308515&sr=8-1&keywords=big+nerd+ranch)

 _Videos_

<http://www.codeschool.com/paths/ios>

<http://teamtreehouse.com/library/ios-development>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really a hard call. On one hand Java is easier to learn than Obj-C in my opinion, on the other hand XCode provides a better workflow than Eclipse, IntelliJ or the newly released Android Studio.

Some people suggested going with a multi-platform framework. I'm against that because you will not really learn how Android or iOS apps really work.

For me, a multi-platform framework is really good when you have limited resources and want to quickly build an app for more platforms. For learning purposes, I recommend going native.

</comment><comment><USER4> Android has a more iterative state of mind. I would do that. Also, It is becoming much more popular, has more users, ... And seems to be winning the fight for mobile phones.

Once you get the product right, you could convert it to iOS. But it takes longer for having an iterative development process there... (long approval time = long waiting for feedback, ...)

</comment><comment><USER5> Go multi-platform with either Cordova(free), Monkey (cheap, <http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/> ) or Gamemaker (more expensive for mobile). You'll have your prototypes ready in days instead of weeks for the last two and maybe even without hiring anyone.

</comment><comment><USER6> I learned iOS/Objective-C as my first programming language. I've tinkered around with Android but haven't shipped much. I would recommend iOS. You get the interface builder/storyboards which should help you prototype.

</comment><comment><USER7> Android would be a good place to start if you intend going global with your apps but if you focus is the States then you gotta start with iOS (although you would still need to get into Android soon)

</comment><comment><USER8> Suggest Appcelerator or Phonegap due to your web skills and the speed with which you can pump out an app. I had a full working app in 3 months that ran on both Android and iPhone. One code base.</comment>


Ask HN: How and where do you store private file you want to keep forever? - <AUTHOR>

"Forever" is a very long time. Hopefully 60 more years if I'm lucky. Way long than most off the shelf storage devices will last.
I currently have about 2GB of personal files (and growing) that I want to retain the rest of my life. Nothing overly interesting, but some files contain sensitive information. I'll only add files once or twice a year, so low availability is fine.
My only real requirement is that I know it's secure. And I know I have the only key. So either I how the physical devices or I use strong encryption before sending it up.
How do you guys handle backups? <comment><USER2> Blockchain! But seriously, I'd do a rewritable optical media, a flash drive, and a spinning drive. I'd do checksums on existing data any time you write to it to ensure nothing has been lost. I'd also do some sort of versioning at each write and actually keep a full copy of the data before the write. That last part could get unwieldy if your data grows over a lot time.

And I would double each storage media and keep one set off site.

This is all a little much for anything less than a "I NEVER can lose this data" requirement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Print it out and lock it in a safe deposit box at the bank. If you can't print the material, put it on two flash drives or disks and put them in the box. Occasionally verify the drives or transfer to new media over time.

There aren't many alternatives that are both safer and more practical for the average person for long time scales. You probably don't want to spend a lot to keep 2GB of personal files stored. Any tech company or cloud storage solution is less likely to still be operating and still be offering the same storage services on decade scales than a bank.

A safe in a location other than a bank, like your home, is more likely to be stolen. In your home, a burglar can force you to open the safe. There's much lower chance of that happening at the bank.

Should an online service fail, you may lose your stored data without notice or recourse. A company can be raided and their servers pulled out of racks by the FBI because of something just one user of the service did. The FBI is less likely to show up at a bank and take other customers' safe deposit boxes.

Should a bank with safe deposit boxes fail, you are guaranteed access to your possessions by the FDIC. Either the FDIC will arrange for your branch to be taken over by another bank, or if no other bank wants to take it over, they will arrange to return the contents of your box to you. This happens immediately: the FDIC guarantees you will have access to your safe deposit box at a failed bank the very next business day should you want it.

I expect the federal government to still be around in 60 years. If they end the FDIC program, you can re-evaluate at that point.

</comment><comment><USER4> high quality optical media stored away from any light.

</comment><comment><USER4> nothing is forever

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. Of course not. "Forever" was a term relative to my lifespan.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your itches with your current to-do app? - <AUTHOR> I'm building to-do app and I want to tune it up for our community. If you're happy with yours please list its strong sides.<p>It is planned as heavy-duty app, kinda Excel, and not like Remember the milk. It is planned to have time tracking, invoicing, customer reports, tracker. <comment><USER2> I'm using org-mode. I like that it is designed as an extensible platform and that it's non-commercial basis means that features aren't held back to monetize a slow release roadmap.

That it's free and includes email and a shell are just gravy on the noodles.</comment>


A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096634/ <comment><USER2> They might want to finish up the "Clear History" feature he announced _last May_ [0] first...

> "If you watch the presentation, we really had nothing to show anyone," said > one person, who was close to F8. "Mark just wanted to score some points." > [1]

[0] [https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear- hi...](https://www.recode.net/2018/12/17/18140062/facebook-clear-history- update-privacy-targeting-data-collection)

[1] [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook- privac...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-privacy- optics-clear-history-zuckerberg)

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't just a humanitarian gesture by Zuckerberg; this is a move to address an existential threat to Facebook. The writing has been on the wall for years: teens don't use Facebook. Instead of letting go of the social feed and the unified social platform vision, Facebook has just piled more crap onto the platform by buying competitors or just building out their features. The result is the overloaded, overfeatured Facebook with no actual social interaction we know today.

Teens know that they could easily become the next victim of the national outrage and humiliation machine. They never wanted to share their fun with grandma and their future employers. They don't want to be their own PR agent and cultivate an online persona. They want to experiment, express themselves freely with no repercussions, do stupid shit and face no consequences; in other words, have the same childhood everyone had before the internet came around. The content you see on Snapchat and Instagram reflects that: is not designed for permanency, it's not meant for adults, it's not meant for Facebook. What Mark is saying here is that he recognizes that reality, and hopefully will begin to tear down the old Facebook infrastructure.

Social media is the business of cool, and Facebook today is currently more GE than startup. If Zuckerberg is going to deliver this vision, he is going to need to let go of a lot of things that Facebook built over the years and maybe even start from the ground up.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, right. The US Congress is currently considering a Federal privacy law which will severely impact Facebook's business model.[1] Facebook is pushing for a Federal privacy law which will preempt California's new law, which turns on in 2020.

[1] [https://www.economist.com/united- states/2019/02/28/congress-...](https://www.economist.com/united- states/2019/02/28/congress-is-trying-to-create-a-federal-privacy-law)

</comment><comment><USER5> I just don't believe that he actually means any of this. Facebook's actions over the years do not indicate that Mark Zuckerberg cares about the privacy of his users.

<comment><USER6> I'd go so far as to say that there is no point in even bothering to read the article because of this.

<comment><USER7> I see downvotes, but I have to agree.

I skim-read this, partly because it's ludicrously long, but mostly because my feeling about Facebook at this point — more than a feeling, _my entire mental map of the company_ — tells me that this is just a big pile of horse shit.

Put another way: this memo could have said pretty much anything, but as long as it purports to be about Facebook doing "a privacy thing", I'm just going to ignore it.

Why would I believe them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's say Facebook actually pulls this off. They deliver a privacy-focused social media platform. It's used by billions of people, daily.

How do they make money off it? If everything is encrypted, they cannot have targeted ads. They can't read the data to push ads for different demographics.

Personally, I think a (more) private social network is a _great_ idea. But I don't see how Facebook's financial incentives align with whatever this is.

<comment><USER9> Do you think this privacy-oriented platform will be free?

I think it'll be: free Facebook is old Facebook (we will own your data) .. profit-Facebook is new Facebook (pay us to keep your secrets) ...

<comment><USER10> This isn't going anywhere :

People that don't "care" -in the sense HN does- about privacy will stay in the free tier. Why should they pay now?

People that do care have either stopped using the platform or will be not be trusting FB enough to bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favourite bit: "As we build our infrastructure around the world, we've chosen not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression."

Facebook is literally built on violating user privacy.

<comment><USER12> So not in America. Or Britain. Or Germany.

Where are those data centers? Switzerland?

<comment><USER13> Switzerland's neutrality is entirely self serving, and they seem to have no problems with taking stolen assets from monsters if it makes them money.

Switzerland: "We don't violate human rights, but we're the bankers for those that do."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > First, Apple doesn't allow apps to interoperate with SMS on their devices, > so we'd only be able to do this on Android.

Mark, I don't want you to read my SMS. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER7> The man needs to hire a copy editor. My girlfriend would have that down to 70% of its current length on the first pass.

<comment><USER15> This was my thought too, it sounds like something written for Wikipedia Simple English.

<comment><USER16> Given Facebook's massively global user base, it's not unlikely that it _was_ edited to have a similar style as Wikipedia Simple English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Over the next year and beyond, there are a lot more details and tradeoffs to > work through related to each of these principles. A lot of this work is in > the early stages, and we are committed to consulting with experts, > advocates, industry partners, and governments -- including law enforcement > and regulators -- around the world to get these decisions right.

Translation: we want to head off regulation by giving empty assurances to lawmakers that we're working on the problem, but we plan to slow walk this so we can continue business-as-usual for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER18> A lengthy article with no mention of meta-data. And this is where the key is, Facebook has realised that they don't need to track you around the internet. People give Facebook the data it needs by contacting businesses on WhatsApp. Someone who has contacted a bike shop is of course interested in bikes.

</comment><comment><USER19> Smart strategy for keeping the majority of their user base happy. Think it will work and they will continue to grow. (Regardless of how the HNews bubble feels about it)

<comment><USER20> I feel like we've come a long way in educating the general public about the importance of data privacy but reading some of the comments on this Facebook post made me realize there's still quite a lot of work to be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> He's right. It's possible the facebook brand may have to step into the background to do it, but this decision for tech companies is being forced by governments now.

It makes sense to take an independent stance, as arguably in most markets today, governments need the consent of facebook users more than facebook needs the consent of governments.

I have always been a facebook skeptic, but this post comes at a very crucial time for encryption policy and the role of globalized tech companies. When Barak Obama said in a speech some years ago something to the effect of how we can't have people walking around with swiss bank accounts in their pockets, as far as many countries without sophisticated interception programs are concerned, they have had to live with the equivalent for the last 10 years.

To me, Zuckerberg's post signals that large tech companies are looking at their 5-10 year horizons and placing small bets that they are going to outlast their opposition on encryption. Brexit is going to cost both the UK and Europe their negotiating leverage, and surveillance in the US won't get a popular mandate.

There are obviously immediate product and competitive needs, but I think his post was driven by macro factors like these.

</comment><comment><USER22> The only way forward for privacy would be the complete deconstruction of the facebook machine. There is nothing that can be done to salvage this beast. Don't be the last person to delete your account. We can turn facebook into myspace. All it takes is for you to let go of your excuses of why you still use their awful products.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is all well and good but where's the apology? Where's the I was wrong? Like it or not, Zuckerberg has a personal brand that screams I'll screw you over if it'll get me to my goals. Nobody is going to trust him, or Facebook, until he rehabilitates himself, and this doesn't cut it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Comments (on the letter) like these are why FB still exists:

> Data protection is a huge concern for us all, and appreciate Facebook are > working to making this platform the best it can be, with our safety in mind.

> Thanks Mark & the FB team.

I mean, seriously? That is some strong Kool-Aide that person has drunk.

</comment><comment><USER25> I applaud this vision, but Facebook is not the one to do it. They have gone too much in the other direction over the years.

I believe the main problem is the lack of GOOD SOFTWARE alternatives to facebook and google. How would you collaborate on a document without google docs? Or share videos without YouTube or Facebook? We have all the hardware we need but not the software. And I mean this in a big way: we don't even have consumer software for local area networks anymore!

Watch this and let me know what you think:

[https://youtu.be/OzXnVSZbvAw](https://youtu.be/OzXnVSZbvAw)

</comment><comment><USER26> The word "encrypt" appears 24 times.

But the following weasel words let Facebook shout "end-to-end encryption" from the rooftops while quietly undermining it with back doors.

 _> There are still many open questions here and we'll consult with safety experts, law enforcement and governments on the best ways to implement safety measures [in end-to-end encryption]._

There is no way Facebook will make their services truly secure, end-to-end. They just want to clean their badly stained reputation by pretending to do so.

<comment><USER27> They are notably trying to redefine the term "end-to-end" which was meant to say contents are not possible to see for anyone but the parties communicating. Law enforcements suggestion to fix end-to-end encryption for their purposes is to break/remove/circumvent the encryption, do key escrow, etc, at which point it is NOT end-to-end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >"I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about. "

Yes that will be the future and it won't be on FB. You are helping bring it about alright but mostly as a reaction to your awful policies and practices.

>"I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform -- because frankly we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing."

That's only partially why people think that Mark. Let's not leave out your outright lies and omissions in front of Congress last year along with your other public denials. You don't have a good or credible reputation period.

>"I believe we should be working towards a world where people can speak privately and live freely knowing that their information will only be seen by who they want to see it."

And FB, advertisers and whomever else who ponies up some cash are assumed to always be included in that group as well. And this is exactly why nobody buys a word of your bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER29> If facebook wants us to believe that it is committed to privacy in the ways that it is suggesting here, than the solutions being proposed here (basically another E2EE messenger) are not sufficient.

Facebook can promise to put itself out of business, spending its cash reserves on development of an ecosystem of interoperable, open source, fully decentralized solutions to replace all of what it does with no central authority and no possibility of censorship or surveillance.

It can find ways for this new decentralized network to be accessible in China, unlike its current platform.

Instead of saying "we'll consult with safety experts, law enforcement and governments on the best ways to implement safety measures," it can expressly refrain from working in any capacity with governments who seek to inhibit speech or expression on the internet.

It can disclose all of the algorithms and decisions that produce the news feed and allow people to opt in or out of them, ensuring that their news feed is not a means of manipulation.

I mean, I can go on and on course. None of this takes any serious genius, just a decision to prioritize freedom and justice in society over money.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here is how you actually do it. Social Networking would just be sharing of keys. We need open web standards for it:

[https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly- dece...](https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly- decentralized-web/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder, who is supposed to be the recipient of that message. People, who care about privacy, will never believe it.

<comment><USER28> >"People, who care about privacy, will never believe it."

It's hard to imagine that anyone who's even remotely familiar with him will believe it either. It's the lead story on nytimes.com now and tenor of the comments is no different than that of HN regarding his nonsense blog post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > We plan to start by making it possible for you to send messages to your > contacts using any of our services,

Didn't Facebook Messanger use XMPP back when the service was new? It sounds like they're going to a closed version.

</comment><comment><USER15> The entire idea of a privacy-focussed social network seems oxymoronic. I agree there are practical improvements to be made to social networking to address the unintended or unpredicted consequences of data sharing (including regulation). But calling the social network itself 'privacy focussed' sets the wrong impression. Better inform users about what is happening to their data, but don't sell your product as private when it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sounds great; setting a reminder to check in on Facebook in a few years.

Not too happy that my data from my deleted account might actually be gone by the time Facebook becomes privacy aware.

Seriously, I saw the movie, it took a few college kids a few months; now a rewrite for privacy will take years?

They're buying time, and I am pretty sure people are already willing to buy privacy. Why can't they sell that?willing

</comment><comment><USER33> The DNA of Facebook does not support marks vision of close communities and private communication. Kodak made one of the first digital cameras, but it was, at is core, an analog company. Facebook, at its core, is a company that vacuums data to sell back to advertisers. Targeted ads in a private chat will never feel private, no matter how loud they scream that it is.

</comment><comment><USER34> I missed the section on:

Advertising Profiles

People expect that if they don't have a Facebook account we aren't mining their friends' address books to build profiles of them that can't be erased because they aren't our customers. We are sorry that we did that and after deleting them earlier this morning we will no longer operate that way...

(not a quote, just what I'd like to have seen)

<comment><USER35> They'd never agree to delete their shadow profiles though. The thing about facebook is that they have over a billion users _and_ information probably about another billion non-users.

<comment><USER34> Until they believe in the root of privacy, they'll never be privacy-focused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Translation: "We're finally getting a bit worried about all this talk about social media regulation. Still, we're going to do our best to implement the smallest possible privacy changes to minimize the impact on our revenues, while still looking like "we're doing something" about the privacy scandals."

<comment><USER24> Heh, no. This is yet more empty promises. They'll not do anything in this letter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder if the aim of this statement is to make it harder for a privacy focused social network to raise money.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sure... whatever... I'm going to be in the Late Majority or Laggards on this train.

</comment><comment><USER28> He should have submitted this to the Onion. Seems like a real missed opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER38> Coming from Facebook? Yeah right. I'd say I would believe it when I see it, but given their shadiness I still wouldn't believe it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Could some kind soul with enough genuine interest slog through this monster and post a few-sentence summary?

<comment><USER20> I read the entire thing and it's honestly not worth summarizing. There's nothing of substance, just a lot of empty platitudes. He describes a lot of generic privacy protections (limiting metadata collection, reducing data permanence, secure data storage) but says nothing as to how or when Facebook will ever implement them.

It basically boils down to a promise that Facebook will "think about privacy" at some unspecified future date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > But we've repeatedly shown that we can evolve to build the services that > people really want, including in private messaging and stories.

Do people really want bots in their private messages? Didn't Instagram and Facebook steal the stories feature from Snapchat?

What people really want is React. How about making a React library for making facebook apps? Like AWS Amplify, but for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER41> Let the fox guard the henhouse

</comment><comment><USER42> With a title like that I expected a link to an Onion article.

<comment><USER19> You're getting downvoted, but I for one thought that was spot on :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When I saw the headline, at first I thought it was an old article that you can read in a different light and have a laugh.

Writing it now is just obnoxious. A lot of text with no meaningful content, mentioning a bunch of problems without offering solutions and without taking any responsibility.

Don't talk about "people prefer", "people expect", "working towards" and "we as a society" \- _you created this_. With all of its problems, and all of the ethical and legal violations. You did things this way because it was extremely profitable and _you are still doing it._

How does anyone take him seriously at this point?

</comment><comment><USER28> This is similar to McDonalds wanting to help fight obesity by adding a salad to the menu.

Mark Zuckerberg has exactly zero credibility at this point.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's like Freaky Friday but it's Wacky Wednesday. Waiting for Trump to announce that he's opening the Whitehouse to immigrants until they get on their feet.

Sorry Mark, no one believes you dummy.</comment>


Show HN:My friend filmed our music video using a crane he invented. - <AUTHOR> http://www.snowballstand.com/release/acenernie/ You can see how he used it in the scooter shots. Its kinda NSFW (cursing). Here is the site for the crane.  http://shootseeker.com/ <comment><USER2> Where's the crane?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I should have explained. It's how he achieved the scooter shots.

You can see the rig here <http://shootseeker.com>

<comment><USER2> That's very cool. He's got some serious kit on that truck. How much is all stuff that worth? Cant you like, strap a camera man onto the end of a big plank of wood or something instead?</comment></comment></comment>


Depression gene 'discovered' - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Health--Science/Depression-gene-discovered/articleshow/4550812.cms

<comment><USER2> My favorite just-so story about the roots of depression is that it emerged during the last glacial period as a response to extreme cold weather. It's a behavioral adaptation that would have made it easier for humans to remain indoors for long periods of time without going crazy/killing each other.

<comment><USER3> other species get depressed too, though. got a link about this? i tried searching around but didn't find anything useful.

<comment><USER2> I couldn't find a good pithy blog post explaining it, so instead I'll direct you to a couple things I did find. I first read about it here (search for 'cave'): <http://www.arthurdevany.com/2005/06/weepy_relatives.html>

Which led me to Randolph Nesse: <http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/> who wrote this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Sick- Darwinian/dp/067974674...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Sick- Darwinian/dp/0679746749)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's odd, I thought the gene had already been discovered, because I thought I got it from my mom.

It's one of those things I just never bothered questioning, but now I'm confused all of a sudden.</comment>


Why are choppers always crashing? (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/10/why-are-helicopters-always-crashing.html <comment><USER2> _The thing is, helicopters are different from airplanes. An airplane by its nature wants to fly and, if not interfered with too strongly by unusual events or by a deliberately incompetent pilot, it will fly. A helicopter does not want to fly. It is maintained in the air by a variety of forces and controls working in opposition to each other, and if there is any disturbance in the delicate balance, the helicopter stops flying, immediately and disastrously. There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter._

 _This is why a helicopter pilot is so different a being from an airplane pilot, and why in general, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooders, introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if anything bad has not happened, it is about to._

Harry Reasoner, Approach magazine, November 1973

As quoted at [https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/flights-and- fancy-b...](https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/flights-and-fancy- brooders-vs-extroverts-36056567/)

<comment><USER3> > There is no such thing as a gliding helicopter.

There is such a thing (very approximately but good enough for this discussion): autorotation. It allows a helicopter to be flown when the engine cuts out, but it does still require a great deal of manual control (from what little I understand of it).

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

<comment><USER4> It's really not that hard to autorotate, you do it at hour 8 in training.

The problem with helicopters is that people fly them close to the ground and other obstacles. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) is a leading cause of crashes, as is flying VFR rated in IMC due to poor weather understanding and processes. Mechanical failures are max 25% of accidents, and 75% of those are due to engine failure alone, and hence autorotation is an option -- if you are high enough and have planned your route well.

You can autorotate at fairly low altitude, but it depends on your forward airspeed, rotor inertia, etc, which is situation and model specific.

[http://www.copters.com/pilot/hvcurve.html](http://www.copters.com/pilot/hvcurve.html)

<comment><USER5> > It's really not that hard to autorotate, you do it at hour 8 in training.

Few students do full down autorotations, and no one does engine-off autorotations. Instructors also don't just roll the power off when students are not expecting it, as that would be far too dangerous. Successful autorotation in a real emergency means the pilot has to execute a difficult maneuver in conditions they've never before experienced.

<comment><USER4> This is a pointless hair splitting. Like all truly dire emergencies, it can be trained for but not actually done. They do it in simulation under a number of stressful conditions, such as during a complicated maneuver or another failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chopper in fs98 was impossibly difficult to fly. I never got it to hover for more than 5 secs. It was like balancing a bead on an inverted bowl. They replaced the bowl with a flat surface in later versions. Don't know if real ones are just as hard.

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems that more special forces get killed in helicopters than in ground combat. The crashes may be due to malfunction, or extremely bad weather, but also because the helicopters are vulnerable to ground fire as they go to reinforce or evacuate men from combat.

US SEALS in Afghanistan:

[https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal- team-...](https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal-team-six- history)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Takur_Ghar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Takur_Ghar) (Roberts Ridge)

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

British SAS/SBS in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falklands War:

[https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/775565/harrys-five- sa...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/775565/harrys-five-sas-pals- killed-in-chopper-crash/)

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/6044194/Two-...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/6044194/Two- SAS-soldiers-died-in-Iraq-helicopter-crash-because-of-notoriously-bad- radios.html)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-454382/For- time-25-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-454382/For- time-25-years-fomer-SAS-man-tells-Falklands-tragedy-killed-20.html)

Coalition forces in Iraq:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle- east/helicop...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle- east/helicopter-crash-takes-british-fatalities-to-14-112031.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/21/iraq.uk](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/21/iraq.uk)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Al- Anbar_CH-53E_crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Al-Anbar_CH-53E_crash)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2018/03/16/594168056...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2018/03/16/594168056/7-killed-in-u-s-military-helicopter-crash-in-iraq)

Australian SAS in training:

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-11/survivor- remembers-19...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-11/survivor- remembers-1996-black-hawk-tragedy/7497914)

One famous example from the Falklands War, where two helicopters crashed in a blizzard on a glacier, but was redeemed by a tremendous feat of airmanship by the pilot of the third helicopter:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paraquet#Reconnaissa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paraquet#Reconnaissance_phase)

</comment><comment><USER8> (2009)</comment>


5 Easy Ways to Tackle IE6's Transparency Issues - <AUTHOR> http://nettuts.com/videos/screencasts/5-easy-ways-to-tackle-ie6s-transparency-issues/ <comment><USER2> The creativity of web developers in solving problems continues to impress me.

But it makes me think, what amazing things could these clever developers do, if they weren't forced to solve "manufactured problems" like Microsoft compatibility?</comment>


Bill Gates speaks about 21st century sanitation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ExNnPMpwjY <comment><USER2> Remember to use the youtube.com version instead of the youtu.be version.</comment>


James Burke Connections, Trigger Effect (1978) - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/XetplHcM7aQ <comment> death-by-ppt I love this series but Episode 1 is not the best in my opinion. I recommend watching Episodes 2 through 8, then go back and watch 1 and 10.

That YouTube channel only has 4 episodes, but the rest (including 2 more seasons) can be found on [https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke](https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke)

Especially relevant given current circumstances. I'm sure that's why it was posted today.</comment>


Apple Developer Videos are Back Online - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/videos/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been waiting to watch some of the developer videos for a while. I'm glad they are back.

Now there's only Xcode Automatic Configuration, Member Center, Program Enrollment and Renewals, and Technical Support to go.</comment>


When a Startup Sends a Passive-Aggressive Email Every Day - <AUTHOR> http://minimaxir.com/2013/05/overly-attached-startup/ <comment><USER2> Wow, a lot of people here are lauding Weebly for their great customer engagement whatever strategy. I don't know how effective these messages are, but working in e-commerce, I can say that customers _don't want to be spammed._

The one thing they have correct is that aggressive subject lines are generally better at getting click-throughs than milder ones. "You'd be crazy to miss out on this" works better than "Check out our new product."

I used to work for a flash sales website, and whenever I told people about it, they'd uniformly say "Oh yeah, I've signed up for them! Way too many emails, can you make it stop?"

I'm sure the folks at Weebly have tested this (or maybe this poor unfortunate soul is part of some silly week-long A/B test to try and improve engagement.) But my personal experience says that Weebly needs to get smarter about how to engage.

More effective: Send someone a couple of welcome emails. Wait 4 weeks. Then send them a message. BAM, lots of engagement, because when you receive the email you say "Huh, this must be pretty exciting, I haven't heard from them in a while!"

Have you ever signed up for Everlane? Go do it and pay attention to the way they do onboarding and email marketing. They don't spam me, but when they do, I'm like "NEATO LET ME SEE YOUR NEW CASHMERE T-SHIRTS" because it seems like a rare opportunity to see a budding startup release a new product. It's all marketing but done in a way that doesn't suck horribly.

<comment><USER3> The depressing part is reading the comments here on HN and realizing that some people just don't see what the problem is. Ok, fine, forget about the ethical aspects here and understand that when you spam your customers like this you tarnish your image because you're effectively putting yourself in the same category as the people who try to sell fake rolex watches and viagra pills.

I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them. If some business people have such warped understanding of reality that they can't see spam when they send it, at least they can get penalized for it.

<comment><USER4> _I suggest that the next time a business, startup or not, tries to "lifecycle email" (yuck) you, don't unsubscribe - spam flag them._

Much as I smiled a wry grin at this suggestion, I have to say, don't fucking do this. Be an adult: if you signed up for something, take the time to try and unsubscribe first. No way to unsubscribe? Unsubscribe doesn't work? Okay, now you should start flagging as spam.

Unsubscribing has the added benefit of being more direct, in a "hey, we spammed this guy with 4 emails in three days, then he suddenly unsubscribed", instead of going "why are we being marked as spam? our lists are completely opt-in!".

<comment><USER5> Giving a company my email is not implicit permission to email me whenever they want. If you actually checked the box "yes, please email me," then yes, you gave permission. But if I did no such thing, then it _is_ spam.

<comment><USER6> I may be entirely wrong here, but I think it is.

> the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still- > revocable permission for it to be sent.

I'm pretty sure that giving your e-mail is explicit permission and an unsubscribe link makes it still-revocable. That said I completely appreciate that emotionally it feel like spam, and I can't imagine why any business in their right mind would feel this was a good business practice.

source: <http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/>

<comment><USER7> No, giving my e-mail address is just that - giving an email address; it does not come with permission to send automated daily emails. For example, I login to facebook with my email address, but I have explicitly withdrawn any permission for facebook to send me any notifications by email in all the opt- out settings.

Subscribing to messages should be explicitly opt-in, and in a bunch of countries is legally required to be opt-in. If I miss an opt-out checkbox, and you send a marketing email - that is spam by definition, if gmail decides to filter you out, then by all means it was the right thing to do; and if it was a local business, they would be fined for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can I refocus this conversation away from you and Weebly? Both for avoidance of personalizing this and to avoid this turning on the specifics of this post and their copy, because the takeaway message for most people reading this is "Should we implement lifecycle emails or not?" rather than "What exact words should I use?" or "What frequency is appropriate for a zero engagement user?"

Bob started using software from FooCorp. Bob, for whatever reason, was not a great fit for FooCorp, and as a consequence has zero engagement. FooCorp is unable to examine the inside of Bob's head, and must make predictions on Bob's behavior based on their model of his decisionmaking processes as informed by their experience with numerous similarly situated customers.

FooCorp made numerous attempts to improve their business relationship with Bob, despite the risk of annoying Bob. They can justify this by pointing to observable evidence that, if they mail 100 Bobs, statistically Bobs actually do start using the FooSoft, and (anecdotally) their customer support team gets emails and blog posts saying "Thanks for being so attentive to my needs!!1" This is actually not shocking to FooCorp, because FooCorp has years of experience with onboarding customers onto FooSoft, and they have talked to _hundreds_ of people who, when asked "Why did you not finish using FooSoft?", responded "I got busy. / I forgot about it. / I didn't do that. Wait, I did that? Wow. Um, hold on, I want to log in right now and fix that. No seriously. That was something I was going to do."

Also, when you get down to brass tacks, if Bob has zero engagement with the product, Bob will not pay for the product, and thus the downside risk of annoying Bob is to a first approximation zero. Bob might, because it is 2013, feel that Bob's opinion of FooCorp is very important to FooCorp even if Bob is not a paying customer, because social media and branding and word of mouth. Bob may not run a software company, but if Bob were to hypothetically talk to people who did, Bob might hear it is difficult to pay engineering salaries with word of mouth but monthly recurring subscription revenues do not have this downside. Thus a speculative hit to word of mouth does not weight very persuasively against a demonstrable massive increase in recurring subscription revenues.

<comment><USER4> I think everyone here understands the economic argument for why this happens; it's the same reason spam still exists. That's not the question; the question is, is it right?

While the rightfulness question is interesting, I'll leave that to others to discuss and go right on to the pragmatic consequences: I am very, very, very unlikely to sign up for a service "just to check it out", precisely because of tactics like this. Even if I do, I will give them a unique email alias that I can disable at will (reject at SMTP envelope stage), and that I keep records of, so that if I get annoyed enough (typically, if their unsubscribe doesn't work or doesn't exist), I will keep a record of them as company, never, ever to do business with.

I don't believe it should be marked as spam (I opted in), but it's also not something I feel should be encouraged.

<comment><USER9> Spam and customer engagement are totally different things.

When you sign up to evaluate something, you're kicking off a sales and evaluation process.

If you are at a restaurant and a good waiter notices that you're picking at some crackers instead of eating your meal, it's normal for them to approach you and see if everything is ok with your meal. You may not want to talk to the waiter, but his job is to make you satisfied with your meal, tip him, and return to the restaurant.

If you ask to waiter to leave you alone and he persists, that's a problem that should be addressed. Likewise, if you don't want to hear from <Vendor X>, you should make your feelings known and get an appropriate response.

<comment><USER10> If you are at a restaurant and a good waiter notices that you're picking at some crackers instead of eating your meal, it's normal for them to approach you and see if everything is ok with your meal.

1\. the waiter is a real person.

2\. the waiter was able to identify a potential issue (the customer was not eating), unlike the e-mail script, which only triggers after a set time period of not logging in. The situation would be more analogous to me taking 30 minutes to eat my meal at a restaurant when the average sit time is 20, and the waiter coming over at exactly 30 minutes and telling me 'did you know that it's been 30 minutes and 7 seconds since you've been seated? if there's anything I can do to help you finish your meal, please don't hesitate to contact me!'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to jump in and clarify a few things. First, we have recently been testing the frequency of our email sending, and the author seems to have been bucketed into the "more frequent" group. That being said, we were actually planning on reducing the frequency of what we emailed the author by roughly 25%, including eliminating the "Your website misses you" and the "It's been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others. I just fast- tracked this and it's now live, so our email volume when you sign up is now much lower.

Second, we put a lot of effort into trying to send personalized email communication that is specific to your use case, but it looks like we missed a very important group, contributors to others' sites. This was a mistake. These emails may make sense if you were starting your own site, but they certainly don't make sense if you were just contributing to someone else's. I'm going to make sure we revise that set of emails within 2 weeks to something more appropriate and even less frequent.

Last, as many here are correct to assume, we are constantly testing and refining our email communications. I think it's helpful to understand our customer's psychology when they are signing up for Weebly, it is instructive in understanding our thought process and why we send the emails we do.

Most of our customers (60%) consider themselves entrepreneurs. They are bringing a new idea to life, things like chairigami.com, themintspace.com, stealthelectricbikesusa.com or weeknightbite.com. They are quitting their full-time jobs to do this and it's a very frightening process.

Creating their site is especially daunting and difficult for them, even though it's so crucial to their success. Many of them start the process, want to finish, but give up. We've found that the first week is the most crucial. In our email communications, it's our goal to try to help them across the finish line to a high-quality site.

In this case, we were emailing too often, and we've stopped doing that. In general, most of our users do appreciate some help and encouragement along the way, and we will keep testing emails to try to make that as effective, helpful, and non-annoying as possible.

<comment><USER12> It's fascinating that even after presumably reading this HN discussion, you would still write things like "reducing the frequency...by roughly 25%" and "we were emailing a bit too often", followed by things like "email volume...is now much lower" and "non-annoying as possible". Lots of people here are trying to tell you something that could help your business, something that has very little to do with the precise number of mails you're sending, and you don't seem to be seeing it at all.

<comment><USER11> Around the same time you posted this comment, I just edited my post to clarify that we were already planning on removing many of the annoying emails, including the "Your website misses you" and the "It's been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds…" emails, among others.

I also just edited "we were emailing a bit too often" because it was more than a bit, it was straight up too often.

If there's something I'm still not seeing, I'd love to hear your feedback.

<comment><USER12> Looks like we overlapped a bit there.

My point was that at the time I posted, numerous comments in this HN discussion essentially said "You're being spammy and abusing the trust of users", and to me, your comment read as "No problem, we're fine-tuning the ways we spam people so now we're only going to indulge in 75% as much unwanted harassment while abusing the trust of this particular group of users, and that makes it all OK".

To be fair, maybe I just saw your post at an unfortunate mid-edit stage, or maybe I'm just in an unusually bad mood for some reason and I loathe spammers. But honestly, at the time it read like one of those non-apology apologies that is only ever given by shady organisations you want nothing to do with. :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The web is a tough place to try to help people.

They sign up for your free virtual ant-farming business, then they don't use it. Why? Beats me. Beats everybody. You can either just ignore them or assume they need help.

If you ignore them, they're guaranteed to go away. If you try to help and they need it, good for you! If you try to help and they don't want it? They don't want to farm virtual ants anyway. So they spam-flag you and you go away. You made an extra effort.

This looks like the best solution to me to a tricky problem. It helps the most number of people. Assuming that everybody that initially wants something is going to somehow pester the crap out of you until they figure out how to do it doesn't seem rational. How else should a service act?

I love a good rant, but I'm honestly left feeling like this person hasn't thought this problem through from all of the relevant viewpoints.

<comment><USER5> What you are describing is not what this person experienced. Weebly sent an email a day, for a week. I understand one email, maybe even two after a few days. But every day for a week is too much.

<comment><USER14> I agree with you and I wouldn't like getting all those emails, but I imagine all this has been tested and this produced the best results. If that is the case, we can't really say this is _too much_.

<comment><USER15> Yes we can. Spam produces good results too, for the spammer. Even if the every-day email volume tested well in the short term, it will still likely have long-term business consequences. And even if it works well for them in the long term, it is still a net negative to society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People claiming the author should have just 'unsubscribed' are missing the point of trust. The author didn't just want these e-mails, he actually lost trust that Weebly was capable of sending informative e-mails at all.

This is a huge loss for Weebly, as they'll never reach the author again by e-mail, even if they were giving away a million dollar.

All in all, in Weebly's case, the e-mails are just spam. They do not have any function other than screaming for attention. Might work for 'growth hacking', but doubt it will do them any good in the long run.

<comment><USER17> agree, I think what a lot of people don't realize is that when you click unsubscribe that it is a signal that your email address is active. For those sites that are sketchy and may sell your address or do something else with it, this only helps them. If they are spamming you without the option to turn down the frequency its spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're a techie, what you consider to be annoying and terrible for "normal" users is likely _vastly different_ to what those users themselves think.

Do you send lifecycle emails right now? If not, take Weebly as a good example of what to imitate. If you do, see if there're any cool ideas you might be missing out on.

Don't - whatever you do - take this blog post as justification or a reason to ignore your users.

<comment><USER19> Ignoring your users is one thing; sending a new user an email virtually every day for 8 days in a row (with a creepy, "we know exactly how long since you've logged in, down to the second" finisher) reeks of the stereotypical greasy salesman hard sell, something "normal" users are well aware of (and hate) from non-web based businesses. Weebly is a case study in what _not_ to imitate.

<comment><USER18> _Ignoring your users is one thing; sending a new user an email a day virtually every day for 8 days in a row (with a creepy, "we know exactly how long since you've logged in, down to the second" finisher) reeks of the stereotypical greasy salesman hard sell, something "normal" users are well aware of (and hate) from non-web based businesses. Weebly is a case study in what not to imitate._

I think you're viewing this negatively because you personally don't like receiving such emails.

Elsewhere I've referred to them as "Here's how to get the most out of our service" emails.

You've chosen to view them as _creepy, "we know exactly how long since you've logged in, down to the second"_ emails from a _stereotypical greasy salesman_.

If you view these emails as spam, you're not going to like them, and you're going to think that "normal" users won't like them as well, as "normal" users don't like spam.

I'm arguing that "normal" users _don't_ view these emails negatively, and so they don't have the same issues you do.

<comment><USER19> Let's say you're looking to buy a car. You go to your local dealership and you see a car that looks promising. You ask to take a test drive, but the dealer won't let you unless you provide your name and phone number for verification. No problem, standard procedure. You take the test drive, head home, but decide it's not for you and decide to look elsewhere.

The next morning, you get a voicemail. "Hey, mootothemax, it's Bob from the dealership. I'm committed to doing everything I can to help you find a new car. Let me know if you need any help in the future."

All good, right? Sure.

The _very next day_ , Bob calls again and leaves another voicemail. "Hey mootothemax, it's been... 2 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 27 seconds since you were at the dealership and you still haven't gotten a car. I miss you. Relax, take a deep breath. It'll be OK. _faint chuckle_ "

 _Already_ it's creepy. But we're not done. Day three, you get another voicemail from the dealership. It's claiming to be Richard, but it's a robodialer. "Hey mootothemax, it's Richard. Just wanted to introduce myself and see if you have any questions. If there's anything I can do, please call me back."

Day four. Bob on the voicemail again. "In today's market, you want to make sure you don't spend a lot on gas. That's why we wanted to make sure you knew our cars are the most fuel efficient in America!"

Bob doesn't call on day five. Must be his day off.

But he's back at it on day six. "Look mootothemax, I know it's hard to decide which car to get; as you may have noticed, we also offer more expensive luxury cars [to add to your confusion]." (okay, that last part Bob didn't really say).

Day seven. "Okay mootothemax, I know you're having a hard time deciding to pull the trigger on a car, so here's something I can offer: 3% off MSRP, but only if we close the deal in the next three days. Call me!"

Day eight: way less than three days later. "mootothemax, it's Bob again. Can you believe it's only been 8 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes and 6 seconds since you came into the dealership?"

Do you think that this scenario is acceptable, or even desirable? If so, then you happen to have something in common with only 8% of the US population.[1] Personally, and I don't think it's fair or reasonable to say this is merely my own personal opinion or failing, if a salesman took the above approach, I'd consider it stalking and would've called the cops on day three.

If you don't think this is acceptable, why do you think it is when it's done through email?

[1]: [http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics- professions.a...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics- professions.aspx)

<comment><USER18> _Let's say you're looking to buy a car. You go to your local dealership and you see a car that looks promising. You ask to take a test drive..._

 _If you don't think this is acceptable, why do you think it is when it's done through email?_

Because I consider these emails the equivalent of "Here's how the A/C works" when you're on the test drive.

You, apparently, consider them to be nothing but the equivalent of having "BUY NOW BUY NOW OMG BUY NOW!" shouted in your ear as you drive.

<comment><USER20> You have a warped sense of "informative".

Theres no content to these emails other than "please come back". These aren't giving him any tips, they are not personal, they're simply autogenerated spam at an exceedingly high frequency.

"Lifecycle" emails are supposed to be a nudge every so often (every few days at most). They aren't supposed to be a naggy, daily, completely auto-generated spam.

Also, this user isn't on the test drive. He's already left the dealership parking lot and hes getting a salesman yelling at him to come back daily. If I had a salesman doing this I'd not only not buy from that dealership, I'd probably have a distaste towards that entire brand of car and go to a competitor.

Rationalize all you want but 7+ emails in ~7 days is spam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I received 15 emails in 10 days when I signed up for Full Contact. Yeah, I wanted to check out your product, so I signed up and tested it out. No, I don't need to be reminded that you exist every sixteen hours.

I had, separately, been discussing one of the less common features at Full Contact with a real person there, and pointed this out to him, forwarding all of the emails back to him as well. He apologized sincerely and helped figure out why this was happening (over email, of course :) ).

It's just an insanely reliable way to turn my opinion from 'this product is intriguing' to 'this product is irritating.'

If you're going to send email spam (and most startups have to, at some point), at least make it pleasant.

<comment><USER22> No, don't just make it pleasant, make it easy for me, the customer, to control. Three levels is probably the most you need: 3) Trivia / social spam, 2) Announcements, 1) Security / billing / account maintenance; three little checkboxes, three bits in a "contact status" byte field somewhere in your DB. Do it. It's not the simplest thing that will work, it's the simplest thing that makes your customer feel like they have some control in the trust relationship you're trying to build with them.

And make it possible to actually close and delete an account; LivingSocial I'm looking at you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> New Relic do this as well. Extremely irritating, made worse by the smug, overly familiar tone of the emails, which were phrased as if I'd shared a frathouse with the copywriter or something.

EDIT: just looked back through them, and that last bit about frathouses was probably overstated. It definitely felt like that at the time I received the messages though.

<comment><USER21> Among my recent favorites:

"Hello NULL," -- from Leap Motion

"I wanted to follow up after meeting you" -- from "Developer Relations Team" (not a person!? did I meet the entire team?) at SendGrid

<comment><USER24> Well at least it wasn't "Hello NullPointerException" followed by a traceback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Overreaction much? Complaining about the email frequency would make sense, daily emails from a service I didn't explicitly request to be mailed so often is obnoxious. But "passive aggressive"? "Weebly is seriously threatening me into publishing my website"? Seriously?

<comment><USER25> Yes, my first thought was clearly this person is unmarried; they have no clue what passive-aggressive really means.

<comment><USER26> I'd love to hear your definition of it, drharris?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Spam is not about content, it's about consent.

This is _ancient_ , and it's disappointing that it appears to be forgotten lost information.

It doesn't matter if the email you're sending is full of great information and money off coupons. If you didn't confirm the email address and didn't get permission to send to that email address the emails you're sending are spam.

I hope weebly has a checkbox for users to opt in to a mail list (or, at least, opt out) - so by giving them his email address and not unchecking or checking that checkbox this user gave them permission to send him email. So they're not spam.

Not being spam is not the same as "acceptable" - an email a day would be frustrating to many people.

</comment><comment><USER9> This guy needs to go get a hug or something.

I actually signed up Weebly in the same timeframe after hearing about it from a friend using my iPad. Unfortunately, you can't do much with it on the iPad, so I signed out and forgot about it. I got a few emails from them, and to be honest, I found them to be interesting enough that I read them and acted upon them. Ultimately, I ended up not using Weebly, because another alternative (Tumblr) was more appropriate for my use case.

End of the day, they aren't "spamming". They are sending you a tickler to remind you of their product while you still remember it, which is a completely legit thing to do. It's particularly legit when you consider that their key demographic is folks who want a website, but want to build that site themselves with drag and drop.

Spamming is when salesmen start assaulting you. I looked at an MDM product, and lo and behold, I have no less than 40 calls from some asshat salesdude in the last 7 days, including Sunday.

</comment><comment><USER28> Unfortunately, as a marketer it's really easy to see how this cycle happens. You send out an email and you see "Oh wow, 75% of the people we sent this email to came back to the site." That's your purpose - to drive engagement. So you set up an email drip that perhaps gets annoying, but in the end you see your numbers higher than they would be without those emails. You forget it's about users because now they're just numbers.

This definitely isn't a problem unique to small or early startups. (Looking at you, LinkedIn).

</comment><comment><USER29> I've wrote a similar piece of the subject 10 days ago.

<https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/96a22e176b1>

The problem with those non personalise lifecycle emails is that they works on the "commoners" but can easily pissed of the tech savy users. Lucky for Weebly, they don't really care about the HN Crowd.

Lifecycle emails works best when they are highly personalise based on some actions the user made in the app or on the website.

So please, if you are looking in setting up lifecycle emails, make yourself ( and the users ) a favor and use powerful tools like customer.io, getvero, etc to easily create to personalised campaigns.

</comment><comment><USER30> "We see from the fact that you haven't used our web site that you are not interested in our web site. Have you considered, instead, being interested in our web site?"

</comment><comment><USER31> This seems like a pretty absurd response to me. First, as OP noted, they could have just unsubscribed. Annoyance gone.

Second, they wrote, "if startups keep sending forward e-mails, everyone loses." This is false. Anyone who learned about new features, or was motivated/encouraged/pushed into publishing their website, won. Many small businesses need the coaching and help to publish their site.

These messages obviously weren't targeted to you. It would be nice if you just realized this and removed yourself, rather than assuming everyone is like you and is annoyed by these emails.

I look at it this way: either I pay the website directly, or they sell my attention/info, or they get a shot at marketing directly to me. #2 is the worst option; for free services, then, directly marketing their upsell to me is the only viable option.

Businesses have to make money. When you use a free service, there is a cost to pay. I think advertising and upselling their services is a very fair option, compared to some of the other models available.

</comment><comment><USER32> Worse is photobucket - they send out a similar amount of 'welcome' emails, even AFTER you click the 'fuck off' (unsubscribe) button. They seem to have stopped after I sent them a nasty email and reported their emails as spam.

</comment><comment><USER33> Upon first glance, this definitely seems like overkill to me. (And yes, you could have simply hit unsubscribe and never written this blog post. But I'm glad you did, so we can all take a look.)

I have to believe Weebly has tested this drip campaign multiple times though and has some data behind their decision to use it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, guys.

I think the echo-chamber that is HN has clouded some of your judgments.

Some of you are actually defending spammers.

<comment><USER35> Spam is unsolicited email. If A gives their email address to B in order to use B's service, and B then emails A regarding that service, AND gives A the opportunity to unsubscribe from such emails, it's not spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The blog post is at least as 'passive-aggressive' as the emails, as opposed to just clicking any of the offered "stop receiving emails" links.

The concluding suggestion -- "if startups keep sending forward e-mails, everyone loses" -- isn't well-supported. Weebly probably has data that these messages work, and even testimony from other customers happy to be reminded that they should finish their website.

Against that, what weight should a single peeved power user's blog post have?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Against that, what weight should a single peeved power user's blog post have?_

And therein lies the problem. There's no real consequence for aggressive marketing, which is why the growth hacking strategies of Quora and FounderDating [1] work. I plan to write an article about that soon.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5676189>

<comment><USER36> This is way milder than Quora's (content-held-hostage, data-collecting) practices. Weebly is trying to help you complete a task you started -- the core task why anyone signs up with them -- and they make it easy to stop at any time.

And both Weebly and Quora are milder than FounderDating's 'dark pattern' of making it hard to realize a smarmy message will be sent out in your name, spending your credibility to harvest more prospects.

Weebly's messages just nudge you along a path you'd already chosen, trying to prove their worth and convert _you_ into an appreciative customer. (They're not trying to extract extra value from your personal info or network as a non- paying customer.) We should expect every business to do the same sort of sales, in a forthright non-deceptive manner, until you give them a gentle signal of disinterest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This kind of thing reminds me of guys who gets one night stands by propositioning every single women they come across.

The end result from his perspective is that he scored. The end result from everyone else's perspective is that he's a sleazy annoying scum-bag.

</comment><comment><USER38> And site operators wonder why I don't sign up for things I _might_ use...

</comment><comment><USER39> The author is just interpreting effective email copy as aggressive communication. Good copywriting persuades the user into doing some action. But When you have no intention of doing that action, the persuasion, or pressure, that the copy induces by trying to make you do something that you don't want to naturally seems aggressive.

I'm not trying to justify the amount of emails that Weebly sends. That's way too many and way too annoying. But lets face it, the content of those emails is simply effective copywriting and the author doesn't like how it makes him feel.

<comment><USER40> If your copy comes across to your prospective users as aggressive and annoying, I'm not sure I'd call that effective copywriting.

<comment><USER41> Well, by his admission, he was using the account to help edit someone else's site with the service. I think that places him either as someone who is no longer a prospective user, or a type of user that falls outside their retention and engagement processes. In either case, that doesn't really negate the GP comment's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> When I look at my Inbox, emails from companies (1) who got my email address directly from me, (2) include an unsubscribe link that doesn't require me to "login", and (3) honor the unsubscribe request ... are the least of my problems.

We can disagree about whether Weebly's tactics are effective (I imagine they might be, for their target audience of less-technical users), but I don't understand the anger. This is very minor on the scale of email "abuse" that happens to all of us daily.

Use the unsubscribe link.

</comment><comment><USER43> So the problem seems to be that too few emails will leave users stranded, and too many emails will make users annoyed. As a solution, I think an approach similar to Beeminder might be good. They use a logarithmic distribution of emails. They send you an email every day at first (for the first 2 days), and if you don't respond, they dial it back to once a week. If you don't respond, they move it back to once a month or so, etc. I think the model is a good balance.

</comment><comment><USER44> To me, the problem with the 'he could have just hit unsubscribe' argument is that there is no rational user that --wouldn't-- unsubscribe after receiving that many emails. So either they're totally ignorant of the sheer bulk of emails they're sending, or their strategy is to spam users until they unsubscribe.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think patio11 is spot on here. Lifecycle emails are very pragmatic. They might be annoying to some users but in general they are a great idea.

related: <http://www.behaviormodel.org/>

"My Behavior Model shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and Trigger. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing." -- BJ Fogg

=> If they signed up for your service and your market positioning/signaling is not absolutely terrible chances are you've got people who are both motivated & have the ability "to do" and might just need a reminder/nudge :)

Of course lifecycle emails can be optimized but I applaud Weebly for having looked into something that so many companies don't even take the time to do.

</comment><comment><USER46> Even though I agree, the author could have simply clicked the "unsubscribe" if he wasn't interested.

</comment><comment><USER47> I used to manage community and email users (people that have signed up but may or may not be active) and we were very careful about emailing people. I didn't do it very frequently.

However, I don't believe it is a bad idea. People like Max fall into the group that isn't engaged and provides no value to the company. A good strategy can be: email him repeatedly until he either engages properly or unsubscribes. I don't understand why he doesn't unsubscribe if it is bothering him so much.

We didn't do it because it didn't align with our branding but I don't think it's such a bad thing.

Facebook actually emails me like crazy to add more friends on my new test accounts.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sometimes email robots can't take a hint.

What about the use of exponentially decaying frequencies for emailing non- interacters (users who aren't clicking anything in the emails)?

Say an email one week later, than two, then a month, then next quarter, year, etc.

</comment><comment><USER49> This actually seems to be a very YC kinda thing, presumably because of the extreme obsession with growth. I signed up for a vendor to check out its features the other day and had 3 different sales people email me each of the next 3 days asking if they could help. Another service did the same "we miss you, you haven't been back since..." How does any of this stuff provide value to me as a user? It genuinely seems like they don't give a shit about their users and simply want people to visit the site so their metrics will stay up.

</comment><comment><USER50> One thing in life is sure: no matter what you do, it will offend someone. Blog's authour is an overly sensitive twit whining about business as usual.

</comment><comment><USER51> My guess is it works fairly well on average, and most people don't think much about it. I wonder what patio would say about this specific case?

</comment><comment><USER52> It's kind of hard to take this guy seriously about pushy tactics when he has an 1140x73 "share my article" section _before_ the article.

</comment><comment><USER53> I forgot I even had a Tumblr account (and can't remember why in the world I signed-up for one) but I got an email from them the other day whose subject line was just "Brilliant."

There was no meaningful body text, just a one-liner about "discovering great content." For a while, I thought it was some sort of spam!

</comment><comment><USER54> It sounds like you may just need <http://www.glider.io>

</comment><comment><USER55> Overly attentive startup?

</comment><comment><USER56> "growth hacking"

</comment><comment><USER57> I didn't plan to spend 15 minutes today reading all the arguments on this thread.

Therefore Hacker News is spamming me.

How can we shut down Hacker News?

</comment><comment><USER58> Just use google spam filter.

</comment><comment><USER59> So again, what's so difficult about clicking this "unsubscribe" button ?

And to post it here?

Really?

Some people do in fact have way too much time on their hands.</comment>


First ever plane with no moving parts takes flight - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/21/first-ever-plane-with-no-moving-parts-takes-flight <comment><USER2> Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18503772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18503772)

</comment><comment><USER3> First? What about ram jets?

<comment><USER4> Fuel injection uses moving parts.</comment></comment>


VintageJS: add some awesome retro-look to your images - <AUTHOR> http://vintagejs.com/i/8c0pO4oKKl

<comment><USER2> Warning - there are some serious NSFW images posted on the 'recent images' page.

<comment><USER3> Wish I looked at the comments first!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really cool. There is no documentation or examples, and I wish it didn't require jQuery, but it appears the code is open source:

<http://vintagejs.com/js/vintage.js>

<comment><USER5> <http://github.com/rendro/vintageJS>

it's an older version, but with documentation ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy smokes, this is good!</comment>


Pushing Polygons on the Mega Drive - <AUTHOR> https://jix.one/pushing-polygons-on-the-mega-drive/ <comment><USER2> The use of vector graphics instead of 3d rendering or bitmap video seems reminiscent of the techniques which allowed Another World to achieve the fidelity it did on the consoles of that era: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7GVubkh4TE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7GVubkh4TE)

Tech overview: [http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/](http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/)

<comment><USER3> Hahaha. I came here to post this. The intro to Flashback (same team) uses a similar strategy and I think is maybe even a little more impressive.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClBaKXB2KqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClBaKXB2KqE)

<comment><USER4> Actually not the same team, just the same publisher that capitalized on AW's success. Eric Chahi himself, the one-man-army responsible for Another World, only did Heart of Darkness afterwards.

<comment><USER5> When you think Chahi basically developped its own little flash framework 15 year prior on a crippled system, all for its own game. Madness.

<comment><USER6> Not uncommon at the time though - Jordan Mechner did something similar. His journals are absolute treasures, by the way:

[http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/](http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/)

EDIT: Well, maybe I speak too soon. Chahi and Mechner don't exactly represent the average developer - they both are polymaths and were capable of combining their broad interests in amazing and creative ways.

<comment><USER5> They seem to have that non specific problem solving skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The imprecise overruns because you'll draw over it is a clever optimization.

It's interesting to compare and contrast these techniques from other excellent sources, like _Michael Abrash 's Graphics Programming Black Book, Special Edition_ [1].

Thought my technical knowledge topped out somewhere in the middle of the 'Quickly Drawing Tiles' section, the prose and algorithmic detail is lovely, the rationales and code is welcome, and the visualization is excellent.

[1] [http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/#chapter-40-of- so...](http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/#chapter-40-of-songs-taxes- and-the-simplicity-of-complex-polygons)

<comment><USER8> Quickly drawing tiles is one of those sections that's really only going to make sense if you've ever done development work on a tile-mapped videogame console, as the mode is quite rare in other applications.

A "tile" is nothing more than an index into a collection of 8x8 graphics squares. If you've played any retro-styled games you've seen the effects of this. They were a great way to deal with memory constraints back in the day, as you reduce 64 pixels worth of on-screen data to a small handful of bytes, describing the index of the tile, and often other attributes like the palette to use, or whether to mirror the tile in a given direction.

Since the Mega Drive can _only_ draw tile-mapped graphics, and has no direct bitmap modes, it makes sense for the rasterization engine in this demo to take full advantage of the hardware. When he talks about drawing an entire 8x8 tile with a one-word write, he means quickly setting the index in this way. Somewhere in memory, he's created 16 solid-color 8x8 tiles, one for each of the palette colors. Then, if any group of 8x8 pixels in a row would be the same color and they're aligned with one of the tiles, he can just point that tile at one of this solid-color indices, and move on. Part of the magic of his algorithm is quickly identifying (in advance) which tiles the megadrive can be quickly drawn with this technique, and which tiles (at polygon edges) need to be drawn more slowly in software.

<comment><USER9> Hey now, your average IBM PC has a tile-mapped display mode, too: we just usually call it "text", and the tiles "characters". :)

But the text-mode 'font' (i.e. the tileset) was often able to be written to, to achieve fast arbitrary-tile drawing results exactly like those of your average game console.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mode#User- defined_charact...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mode#User- defined_characters)

<comment><USER10> Have a look at the annual text mode demo contest [http://tmdc.scene.org/](http://tmdc.scene.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You want to go one further... according to this interview[1], Yuji Naka actually wrote a 3D graphics engine for the Master System! :) It was very low resolution, of course, but...

[1] [http://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mark_Cerny_(2006-12-05)_by_S...](http://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mark_Cerny_\(2006-12-05\)_by_Sega-16)

<comment><USER12> According to another interview that I can't find at the moment, he also wrote a Famicom emulator for the Mega Drive, which might have been the first Famicom/NES emulator ever written.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here, happy to answer any questions you might have.

<comment><USER13> I had a couple of games on Mega Drive that did basic 3D, or seemed to. One was F1, where a few objects seemed to be true 3D. See the overbridge at 59s and then the long tunnel at 1:01 here for instance: [https://youtu.be/qofonsN3Nwc?t=57](https://youtu.be/qofonsN3Nwc?t=57) The long tunnel is made of several short tunnels.

The other was Gunstar Heroes, where the first boss is made of 3D cubes. See here at 4:00: [https://youtu.be/9v3B1hzMwnQ?t=240](https://youtu.be/9v3B1hzMwnQ?t=240)

I'm just interested if you know or can guess anything about how the "3D" might have been done in those.

<comment><USER14> I don't know about the F1 game but I can take a guess on Gunstar Heroes.

I noticed the cubes are always aligned perfectly to the axis. And they have an isomorphic projection so the cube is always the same height (although that shouldn't be strictly necessary) as it's rotating. I also noticed the cubes never seem to get smaller if they are closer to the background.

Because of this you could just have a series of sprites each showing the cube in a different angle of rotation.

Now all you need to do is properly position a bunch of sprite (16 cubes + head) and it looks like a bunch of cubes that are actually drawn in 3-D. It wouldn't surprise me if they have some small table of the X/Y positions of the cubes precomputed so they don't have to do that in real time.

In fact since every cube is always rotated at the same angle you could just have one sprite in the system table and update it every frame.

That's my guess anyway. Clever sprite trickery.

It wouldn't surprise me if F1 uses something closer to what is described in the article (although much less capable).

<comment><USER7> Your analysis appears correct, as several sources write that Gunstar Heroes uses multi-sprite bosses [1][2].

F1 on the Mega Drive owes its existence to an earlier game for the Atari ST, _Vroom_ [5]. The brainchild behind that game, "Dan McRae", talks in a video interview [3] about how he arrived at that particular version of the game from his earlier revisions on older platforms -- where techniques shown in Lou's Pseudo 3d Page [4] apply, to more advanced techniques [6] similar to the ones presented in this submission.

F1 on the Mega Drive was done by the same dev studio that collaborated with McRae on Vroom, and at least one of the same programmers, but presumably had to do some advanced tilemap trickery specific to the console. Unfortunately, compared to other games in this series, there is very little information on the technical aspects of the Mega Drive version.

[1] [http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gunstarheroes/gunstarheroes...](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gunstarheroes/gunstarheroes.htm) [2] [http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sega/genesis/best-sega- genesi...](http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sega/genesis/best-sega-genesis- graphics-sound) [3] [https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA](https://youtu.be/ZTd- fFScLGA) [4] [http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/](http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/) [5] [https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA?t=7m33s](https://youtu.be/ZTd- fFScLGA?t=7m33s) [6] [https://youtu.be/ZTd- fFScLGA?t=10m28s](https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA?t=10m28s)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that information, that's still really interesting. And wow, Vroom looks exactly like F1: I even see many of the exact same track assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice article. I got a bit lost at the section explaining the left-to-right technique, and wanted to ask about that here, but now I see there's pseudocode and even illustration of the technique. Great that you've gone through the effort to add those, they are really useful to clarify and take away any misconceptions.

</comment><comment><USER16> OK, for those ignorant like me:

Mega Drive == Sega Genesis.

I loved that console, impressive feat indeed!

</comment><comment><USER17> Absolutely freakin' mind-blowing demo. Super impressed.</comment>