Hands-On with the $159 Google Pixel Buds - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/hands-on-with-the-159-google-pixel-buds/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook <comment><USER2> My opinion: Google is selling and pricing hardware based on software capabilities. For a lot of people, myself included, some of these features are amazing. That said, at the end of the day, it's still a $160 version of something that are commonly broken, and have cheaper 'dumb' versions of for a few bucks. This makes me really hesitant to buy.

Ideally, what I'd like to see to make myself, and I'm sure some others, a buyer is a free replacement program. I'm more than willing to support awesome software if I don't have to worry about it's backing hardware breaking so easily, especially something a lot of folks jam in their pockets.

<comment><USER3> I'm on the other side I guess, but with the same conclusion.

I can tell from the design that I will never wear those ear buds. There is no way to create a decent seal in the ear using just hard plastic, so the sound will suffer for music, and that's the main reason I buy earbuds.

I'm not a snob about music stuff, but for around 100 USD I get a decent pair of earbuds that create a proper seal and gives me good music quality. I'd love the features, but I'm not going to sacrifice the main reason I use in-ear headphones in the first place - the ability to relatively cheaply have good quality sound.

<comment><USER4> They can be a safety hazard. Pedestrians wearing them don't pay attention to their surroundings at all. The fact they are in ear means it's hard to notice when someone is wearing them. I view non isolating as a necessary feature for earphones generally used on the go. I know people swear by them for long train and subway commutes but I think it's pretty stupid wearing them for walking about, just like wearing headphones while cycling.

<comment><USER5> Agreed - I'm into these earbuds specifically because they _don 't_ seal. I have nice headphones at home for "actual" listening.

When I'm out and about I have to balance sound quality with not getting hit by a bus. For me anything I wear outside needs to let in outside noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is just google trying to be apple, except with shitty products. The $160 airpods actually bring something new and worthwhile to the market. This $160 "wireless" wired earbud brings nothing except inconvenience.

<comment><USER7> Google's translate in real time, while apple's were a copy-cat of countless other wireless headphones. I'd argue the opposite of your claim. (Apple did make them smaller than usual though, which is new I suppose).

<comment><USER8> Googles _don 't_ translate anything though - all they bring to the party is a button that works with Google's translation software on your phone. Previous HN threads included responses from googles who worked on the feature that confirm this.

Also, which earbuds do you think the AirPods are copy-cats of? The only real wire-free buds out when they were announced were the original Bragi ones which were priced over $100 higher, had lower battery life, and were larger.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918)

<comment><USER9> I seem to remember FreeWavz & HearNotes before Apple's "AirPods"

<comment><USER10> You mean the FreeWavz that still aren't shipping or the HearNotes which ripped off all their Kickstarter backers before getting sued into oblivion?

<comment><USER11> Earin actually shipped and so did Bragi.

<comment><USER12> Earin: no microphone. Bragi did ship first but with lots of flaws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do the earbuds actually do any of the translation work? I think they are just bluetooth earbuds with touch control, all the real-time translations are done in google's translation app. Google released this real-time conversation translation to the app back in 2015. I don't see anything special to the hardware itself that could justify the $160 price.

<comment><USER14> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15404918)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the pointer! That explains it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Read the article because I thought google came out with a "light" version of the pixel.

Given how fast phones become outdated, and battery life deteriorate, 200$ is what I want to pay for a phone if I have to replace it every other year...

I lose and break headsets all the time. For me they are consumable. That's way too expensive for consumable.

<comment><USER17> Just get a Moto G or something. They fit the price and function well as a "consumable".

<comment><USER18> The G5 is dirt cheap at Costco. It's a great phone except for the camera.

If Moto could put a decent camera in there (go ahead and charge me an extra $50), it very well could be my ideal phone.

<comment><USER19> What is the G5 price at Costco?

<comment><USER20> The Moto G5 Plus is around $220 at Costco, but has been as low as $180 depending on sales that may be running in any given week.

<comment><USER21> It should also have the same sensor as the Pixel 2, although not the same software, OIS, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I really want is a windows desktop version of the google translate app so I can understand all the Chinese PUBG players who are playing on the NA servers(For some reason I can't really wrap my head around the Chinese say their own servers are unplayable do to latency). It's supper frustrating join a 4 play squad game on the NA servers and discover you can't understand any of your teammates in a game where communication is fundamental.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is not a good review. It was a quick "I put them in my ears during the event and wrote about it" article.</comment>


Curcumin suppression of cytokine release and cytokine storm - <AUTHOR> https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Curcumin-suppression-of-cytokine-release-and-storm.-Sordillo-Helson/8447bdc37e389c1927c6e9f7c1d2eed89a9ca0d1 <comment><USER2> ...provides evidence that curcumin is an unstable, reactive, nonbioavailable compound and, therefore, a highly improbable lead..." [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just wondering if curcumin can be used in case cytokine storm due to COVID-2019 are there any trials going on.</comment>


Show HN: I wrote "Cracking the UX interview" v0.1 - <AUTHOR> https://productdesigninterview.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

I'm happy to share my book with you. It's goal is to help UX/product designers to prepare for job interviews, practice their skills and build designers hiring process at their companies.

I believe there is not enough resources for designers to prepare for job interviews (unlike for engineers/PMs). Often designers don't know what to expect from the interview. On the other side, many businesses don't know how to evaluate designers efficiently, especially their first design hire.

I decided to share my experience of hiring designers at WeWork and my first step was sharing publicly the exercises we used during interviews ([https://blog.prototypr.io/product-design-exercises-we-use- at...](https://blog.prototypr.io/product-design-exercises-we-use-at-wework- interviews-2ee1f5a57319)). The feedback I received was great. After talking to both designers and employees I decided to write this book that will help both sides to improve their skills, create better expectations and eventually build better products.

You can read more about the story behind the book here: [https://productdesigninterview.com/story.html](https://productdesigninterview.com/story.html)

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi there, I followed the link and saw this on your web site:

How much time will it take me to read this book? The book has 158 pages, so it should take you about 3-4 hours. I value your time, so I worked hard to keep the noise-to-signal ratio high to make sure you can finish it over a weekend.

Well, unless I am getting this wrong, I think you mean the opposite. You want to keep the noise-to-signal ratio low !!!

you see, errors like those, discourage me from going any further with your book.

that said. Good luck with it.</comment>


Dart Website Relaunch with 1.0 Release - <AUTHOR> https://www.dartlang.org/

<comment><USER2> I really fail to see the point of Dart, especially since awesome client side frameworks like Angular already exist.

Why doesn't Google throw more resources at them instead of creating something from scratch that has a very high possibility of being abandoned in the next 2-3 years.

<comment><USER3> Because writing/improving yet another JavaScript client side library fails to address the fundamental flaws with JavaScript which are well laid out. ECMAScript 6 will likely correct some of these flaws, but the necessity for backward compatibility continues to be a stumbling block. Dart is a clean break and fresh slate while retaining a familiar syntax and interoperability/compatibility.

Is it a long shot that it will unseat Javascript? Sure. But, competition is good for JavaScript. Google's number one interest is in improvement across the entire client side web app infrastructure since its business is built upon it. It can push Dart while improving JavaScript in parallel.

<comment><USER4> I definitely agree that JS itself could be improved, but while Dart improves some things, it makes others a lot worse. Look at the Fibonacci program on dartlang.org, and compare it to _any_ language that's popular with web developers: Python, ruby, Coffeescript or even scala. Multiply that unnecessary overhead for every function in your app.

<comment><USER5> Fibonacci function in Dart can be as easy as:

fib(n) => n < 2 ? n : (fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2));

Examples on the main page just exists to show cases as much language features as possible. It does not say that you _have_ to wrap your Fibonacci into a class.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's a matter of bad docs giving the wrong impression then? Examples should be terse, the ability to create unnecessary wrappers don't seem like much of a feature to show off.

<comment><USER5> Strictly speaking it's not a doc. It's a snippet on the main page that tries to show case available language constructs. I do agree however that wrapping Fibonacci in a class looks a bit strange.

Documentation that showcases features in the terse form is available at [http://synonym.dartlang.org/](http://synonym.dartlang.org/)

If you have better ideas you can file a bug or even submit a pull request for the site: [https://github.com/dart-lang/dartlang.org](https://github.com/dart- lang/dartlang.org)

<comment><USER4> Web pages showing people how to do things are documentation. No inclination to contribute, Google have known that verbosity is a common reason for disliking Dart for 750+ days and haven't done much about it. I'm fine using JS and, when I want strong typing, know that Typescript is there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome congratz to the Dart Team on shipping a quality product to the world!

Really hope they're able to keep investing in Dart, they've got an amazingly talented team and IMO Dart's one of the few languages in recent times with the engineering prowess and right focus on fast iterative development, speed, simplicity, flexibility and consistency that's pushing comp-sci forward.

<comment><USER7> "pushing comp-sci forward"

nit - The Dart team have explicitly said that they are not doing any features based on new computer science research. The Dart project is built on pragmatic engineering decisions, rather than "pushing comp-sci forward".

This is a good thing in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest announcement for me is that the Dart VM will be embedded inside Chrome: [https://twitter.com/dart_lang/status/400915745413939200](https://twitter.com/dart_lang/status/400915745413939200)

<comment><USER9> This has sadly the potential of making Chrome second coming of IE6, with enterprises locked in a system that is too successful to have the incentive to evolve.

As long as the Dart specification is not governed gy a body encompassing all major browser vendors, this is a very dangerous development (And yes, I know that being governed by a standards body seriously hampers the evolution of a standard, but everything is a tradeoff...)

<comment><USER6> Such uninformed comparisons are getting extremely tiresome and I consider to be the enemy of progress. There is nothing more that the Dart Team can do to make it anymore open - they're doing as much as is possible.

This is nothing like IE, which is actually proprietary and closed-source. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing about Dart that's proprietary. Dart is 100% open source, including patents grants, it's completely developed in the open and for the last 2 years has seen steadily progress with feedback from the public mailing list. It's actually a goal for the project that everyone is able to freely use Dart in any capacity. Lars Bak already said that after 1.0 is shipped they're going to work on getting the language standardized. There is nothing legal or technical stopping other browser vendors using Dart, any hesitations are 100% political.

Dart is finally the first real alternative where we may be able to progress beyond JavaScript, that as a core objective also compiles to first-class JavaScript, i.e. many features dismissed because it couldn't be efficiently transpiled to JS. I care about progress, the current state of web development is fragmented and broken, we need to be encouraging more initiatives like Dart that challenges the status-quo and is able to progress past the fragmented inconsistent mess we have to deal with now in trying to develop complex, rich, high-performance web apps.

<comment><USER9> The problem is that even if Dart is completely open and patent free (and I agree that there is a vast difference between Dart and ActiveX in this regard), if the other browser vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't pick it up, it will still be a walled garden, even if the wall is built by the others.

Also Google has shown signs of embrace, extend extinguish when it comes to essential parts of Android, which makes me a bit wary.

I would love nothing more that Dart superseding JS as the goto language (and compile target) for browser development, as it is doubtless a step forward. But there are pitalls hidden on the way there and the outcome is determined by the path we will take.

Of course hesitations are political, because the outcome will be determined by political actions of everybody involved, Google, MS, Apple and Mozilla. Technical merits alone don't guarantee a happy outcome, sadly.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, although it's not a walled garden when others are artificially putting up the wall, since they continue to enjoy the complete freedom if they ever want to take it down.

Luckily unlike other walled gardens, the quality of Dart2JS, i.e. first-class source-maps support and many benchmarks showing it even outperforms hand- crafted JS, ensures that Dart apps will continue to benefit and run in other modern browsers even without their support, where the only difference will be the start-up and runtime performance of the running code, so we end up getting it back down to technical merits.

<comment><USER10> How are Mozilla and Apple putting up a wall ? Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution where ALL the committers work for Google.

[https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list](https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list)

<comment><USER6> Please re-read the parent, I've replied saying it's not a walled garden when others are choosing not to adopt it.

> Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution

You use the word 'proprietary' but I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean you have complete access to the entire source code implementation and freedom to use all of it or any of it, in anyway you see fit. It doesn't describe a project that's driven by feedback in a public mailing list, that welcomes external feedback and contributions, and it's rarely used to describe a project with a core goal for it to have no-legal-or- technical-barrier, free access, encouraging its wide-spread adoption.

By your definition most Open source projects are proprietary and non-standard, where most programming languages aren't even standardized, the difference with Dart is that it actually has the commercial backing that can justify the effort in actually getting it standardized, which it plans to do now that Dart 1.0 is shipped, just as Lars Bak announced at Google IO.

Again like many OSS projects, the Dart project has taken external contributions, but the brilliant minds that Google have brought in to work on Dart full-time are indeed being paid to do so. It's not uncommon, to accept Q/A verified external contributions but to ensure only employees have free reign and project-wide commit access. Even Dart's internal contributions still have to go through a Q/A code-review process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does dart vm use type information to optimize? I can't find a good explanation. I'd really like to use static typing to gain both speed and early error checking.

<comment><USER5> If you mean type annotations then no, right now Dart VM does _not_ use type annotations to optimize things.

Dart VM features an classical adaptive optimizations pipeline that first gathers type information from the run and then optimizes hot methods using collected type feedback to specialize the code.

For more implementation details about Dart VM optimizing compiler you can check out my talk from Strange Loop 2013 [http://s3.mrale.ph/StrangeLoop2013.pdf](http://s3.mrale.ph/StrangeLoop2013.pdf)

<comment><USER12> When will it switch from JIT to AOT? (SCNR)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. Does this integrate with Visual Studio / ASP.NET MVC ? Otherwise this is a non-starter for me.

<comment><USER14> Typically, you would integrate it with ASP.NET the same way you do any other Single-Page App not written in JS or Typescript.

It ships with a dart2js compiler that you can use in VS. However, to really get the ease of development you're looking for you'd probably use VS to build/debug the backend, and additionally, the dart editor (special eclipse version) to debug the front-end. You'd have to enable your backend to support CORS calls for this type of setup. However, Once you are ready to deploy, the app builds to HTML/JS/CSS files that you can just embed normally in your solution.

I think what you're getting at is - is it better than JS or typescript + angular or backbone? It'd probably a matter of taste. The language is different from the "syntactic sugar" on top of JS that typescript is. Dart lets your bridge to standard JS libraries (i.e., Jquery etc), but, it also provides most of the functionality in the standard library. It provide a built-in unit test and logging framework and a nuget style repository of other libraries. Additionally, Dart's Polymer library provides an MVVM framework. You can define controls and combine into single-page webapps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can see Dart being big in enterprise, although with no support for IE7 and IE8 this could be an issue...

<comment><USER16> Not until there is a support across browsers and a must have framework that can only be used from Dart.

I still don't see any enterprise requests for CoffeScript, TypeScript or any other language that targets JavaScript.

When you work in teams, everyone across the company that needs to touch the source code needs to know the respective technologies.

<comment><USER15> There is cross support in the form of Dart2JS although that's IE9+

That is true, but then I'm not sure they offer as much as Dart does. (Plus I bet some MS shops use TypeScript).

You would think, but how many people developing Objective C know C well, it's more true in the beginning but as you go on the need to know about the target runtime diminishes. Do you know much about the JavaScript VM in the browser and how that compiles to C?

<comment><USER16> The point is what language the enterprise cogs need to learn and the supported browsers.

> Do you know much about the JavaScript VM in the browser and how that > compiles to C?

Of course, if you want to write JIT friendly code you need to know the magic JavaScript incantation code patterns.

There is a reason why all browser vendors have developer sessions on their conferences about those patterns.

<comment><USER15> What about C to assembler?

<comment><USER16> Same thing. That is what -S in gcc is for.

Other compilers offer similar flags.

And before you ask, Assembly manuals explain how many cycles an opcode takes and what are the expected side effects on the chipsets.

<comment><USER15> The relevance of that is pretty insignificant unless you are building a framework or compiler. That's the point of abstraction.

<comment><USER16> Or if you don't care about performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Dart is new, yet familiar

Yes, but most people who write web apps don't like Java syntax. Publicising Dart without changing that won't stop the low adoption Dart's had for the last two years.

Edit: a reminder that that was the biggest piece of feedback from Dart announcement 776 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=oEG20axbbQ4CeS0NXvabbv](https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=oEG20axbbQ4CeS0NXvabbv)

<comment><USER3> I can't think of any language other than Go that had relatively high adoption pre-1.0 . Of course I'm sure someone will point out a few examples... but I digress: Last I checked Java was the #1 or #2 top programming language in the world. Perhaps Dart makes it easier for a Java developer to do front-end web development while using a familiar paradigm.

<comment><USER17> Reports of Java's death has been greatly exaggerated ;-)My guess is, Java8 will solve a lot of the whining about boilerplate types. The closure syntax, is in someways, more economical than JS.

<comment><USER18> I'm willing to be we'll still be talking about Java's impeding death in 10 years here on HN. With all the different languages supported on the JVM, and new ones to be invented....it's not going anywhere.

<comment><USER15> Or the fact it seems to be very prevalent in places like India and China.

The fact there is a new fashionable language in the valley doesn't mean it's going to be popular world wide.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


School Bullies Prey on Children with Autism  - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/school-bullies-prey-on-children-with-autism/

<comment><USER2> Joeycfan, buddy, you've been hellbanned for almost 1,000 days ever since your comment here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000770>

Logout and refresh the page, you will not see your comment here

</comment><comment><USER3> Surely this is no surprise.</comment>


The lies that software developers tell - <AUTHOR> http://startups.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/07/the-lies-that-software-developers-tell.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+VcInDc+%28VC+in+DC%29

<comment><USER2> I really wish I had enough karma to downvote this article. I've certainly heard such lies from bad developers before, but the author frames some of the lies as if _all_ developers tell them. As a developer myself, I found the article to be snide and insulting.

<comment><USER3> Articles can't get downvoted, only flagged. Personally, I completely disagree with it, but I wouldn't flag it because of its relevance to HN. I only flag spam, linkbait and off-topic stuff, usually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I... I have to reply to this ridiculous article. First, i want to point this guy out. This guy is called Don Rainey and he works for Grotech Ventures <http://www.grotech.com/> which like to show how many CEOs they have.

Straight up, grotech ventures doesn't know how to properly render websites, see here, [http://www.procrastinatorstangent.com/rd/hacker_news/grotech...](http://www.procrastinatorstangent.com/rd/hacker_news/grotech.jpg)

so tweak that, Don.

no - but seriously, I came here to write something important, and here it is: I don't know if Don is managing _right now_, but judging by this article, i'm going to assume he is (even though this is probably a list of things not to say when doing a pitch to him). Now Don has been managing peeps like most us at HN for 30 years. That's crazy.

can you imagine doing something for 30 years? I can barely imagine doing the same something for 5, but he's done this for 30. That means he has experience.

Now, I don't know Don, but today, on this cool sunday, Don has summed up 30 years of experience to me into 8 rude complaints. He has pointed out flaws he has seen over and over again without pointing out any solutions or constructive criticisms or proper examples to look up to. And that to me is like a child complaining.

dev - "it's modular, so we ca-" don - "no."

what? what kind of conversation is _that_? can you not think of 1 modular application ever built? By the comments here, some people clearly have. Off the top of my head, here is one modular project <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrlicht_Engine> and here is one of its modules <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGRE3D>, here are some of ITS modules: <http://www.ogre3d.org/addonforums/> and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGUI>

Now these and other examples versus his points could be argued as exceptions, and from Don's point of view, as a VC, then yeah - probably few and far apart. But what does that say about what he is talking about? what does that say about VC pitching? and promise offerings? and the fucking nerve racking experience that must be to have to face off a Negative Nancy like him for money.

Don Rainey comes off as the kind of guy who "knows when it's not right" but has no direction into how to achieve something that is satisfactory even for himself.

[http://clientsfromhell.net/post/697519797/me-lets-talk- about...](http://clientsfromhell.net/post/697519797/me-lets-talk-about-color- first-do-you-have-any)

[http://clientsfromhell.net/post/742771834/me-could-you- pleas...](http://clientsfromhell.net/post/742771834/me-could-you-please- provide-us-with-details-of)

[http://clientsfromhell.net/post/789388118/while- developing-a...](http://clientsfromhell.net/post/789388118/while-developing- an-affiliate-website-for-one-of)

<comment><USER5> One of the reasons really like and recommend the _Antipatterns_ book ([http://www.amazon.com/AntiPatterns-Refactoring-Software- Arch...](http://www.amazon.com/AntiPatterns-Refactoring-Software- Architectures-Projects/dp/0471197130/)) and approach is that it starts with the identification of a bad pattern (this author's complaints are at a higher level, though) and ends with recommendations on how to re-mediate it.

As you indicate, based on this article it's hard to see Mr. Rainey providing constructive help, and for that matter I wonder what he's trying to accomplish with this screed. I suppose that's consistent with it, the major takeaway is "don't get involved with this person or his firm!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This guy seems like a real jackass.

<comment><USER7> Anyone who has this kind of attitude is going to bring out the worst in both the selection process for his team and the quality output of that team. It is little wonder that his experience has been so poor, I don't know a good developer that would work for something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I was here working until 4am"

This happens. Sometimes we get urgent (or unreasonable) requests for features and not enough time to implement them. I'd much rather be doing /anything/ else at the time usually. Like sleeping for instance.

"It is the server or bandwidth"

To be fair, sometimes it's both.

"With the product debugged, we need to go back into the code and speed it up"

I'd much rather get to a solid and tested implementation that we can revise to improve performance than never get anything working at all.

<comment><USER9> Also on the 4am thing there is this:

 _Which is true if you include "off and on" 10 minute coding periods_

Showing that not only does he not understand how programming is done, but he also lacks basic knowledge of how to use quotation marks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let me be devil's advocate:

1\. I could do that in a weekend

This is a _figure of speech_. It's not literally true, it just serves to reinforce a point. It means that they can do X in a relatively short period of time.

2\. It's completely modular

It's perfectly possible to write modular code. It's also perfectly possible to take non-modular code and make it modular. I've done both.

3\. With the product debugged, we need to go back into the code and speed it up.

Performance issues are bugs just like anything else. They must be triaged. If it's major, then you can't just _leave it in_. If it's minor, then maybe you can. Whether the fix could cause more bugs is irrelevant: there's always this risk when changing any code (no matter how large or small the fix).

7\. It is the server or bandwidth

It's not unusual for resources or bandwidth to be an issue. You can't always blame it on the code.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to disagree with a few of these, especially #3. Slow code isn't necessarily bad code. In fact, speeding it up may turn it into bad code.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've probably seen at least one example of each of these at some point in my career (Education, consulting, entertainment, financial and online sales industries, 2 of which were startups). Most of the developers who act like this didn't last long. I have also seen all of these "myths" busted.

Sometimes the server really is anemic. I've seen a new feature set added in a weekend of 4am hacking sessions that involved code, not cola and porn. I've seen people get RIGHTFULLY blamed for their shitty code. And I've seen the UI get tweaked so that it works so flawlessly for the demo that it got opened to private beta the next day.

People who are this acerbic and jaded about things in their line of work should consider doing something more interesting and fun with their time.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious. How many have better bandwidth at work than home, especially for games and porn?

At work we have 9 Mbit up and down. At home on Comcast I get typically 10-20 down (regardless of speedboost or whatever they call it) and 2 or 3 up. Of course work has an SLA so in theory should have less downtime, but they have actually been not too different (an SLA really means you will get generous credits for outages, not that you won't have them!)

Overall I'd have to say that home wins.

</comment><comment><USER13> _It's completely modular_

If they are not building systems that are modular, then you are most likely nickle and dime'ing you development strategy and getting junior developers when you need seniors. This will always result in spaghetti code and the famous "we need to rewrite this" to any system they did not write.</comment>


Meet Q, a Genderless Voice - <AUTHOR> https://www.genderlessvoice.com <comment><USER2> I was expecting something sounding like whispering, or Wookie, or maybe a child. It sounds a lot like a woman to me. Perhaps in the lower frequencies it sounds like an older male teenager.

To be quite frank, I think the goal is quite dehumanizing and I don't see how this helps, really.

If fighting racist stereotypes and prejudice is not achieved by means of avoiding the issue, why would it be any different with gender? Aren't simple respect for the other and fostering a culture of dignity the true goals?

Our brain's lock-in heuristics will always find a way to reinforce contrasts so that we can navigate the social world. If not gender, something else. What is needed is conscientiousness.

<comment><USER3> I love to quote Beauvoir's plato page [1], which is particularly well written I find (emph mine), and relates very well to what you've just brought up:

"Before The Second Sex, the sexed/gendered body was not an object of phenomenological investigation. Beauvoir changed that. Her argument for sexual equality takes two directions. First, it exposes the ways that masculine ideology exploits the sexual difference to create systems of inequality. _Second, it identifies the ways that arguments for equality erase the sexual difference in order to establish the masculine subject as the absolute human type._ Here Plato is her target. Plato, beginning with the premise that sex is an accidental quality, concludes that women and men are equally qualified to become members of the guardian class. The price of women's admission to this privileged class, however, is that they must train and live like men. Thus the discriminatory sexual difference remains in play. Only men or those who emulate them may rule. Beauvoir's argument for equality does not fall into this trap. _She insists that women and men treat each other as equals and that such treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated_. Equality is not a synonym for sameness."

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/)

EDIT: from an artistic point, imagining what a sexless voice would sound like is an interesting project !

<comment><USER4> Anyone citing platos republic do so with great disservice if they don't mention that it use satire as a mechanism for political commentary. Below is a few quotes and extracts from plato's republic, and just imagine this being spoken with a straight face.

The guardian class is a selected breeding program where the best women and best men exclusive breed with each other, and any deformetives or lower quality personage got put in an "unspeakable and unseen place".

When a child is born it get immediately taken from the parent into the hands of breeding pens to be trained into protecting and valuing the collective community above all else. The breeding pens is located in a certain section of the city and apart from the guardians in order to preserve equality and avoid personal possession from the parents.

The children, being pre-destined to participate in wars, should accompany and observe the guardians in battle as "spectators of war". The involvement of the children in war serves as an opportunity for the Republic to instill a sense of patriotism to the state and admiration of the mighty Guardian class. They should help out and serve in the whole business of war.

To sum up: We are talking about Eugenics, genocide, removal of personhood and individualism, extermination of the concept of family, and creating child armies from the elite. This in a time period where nobility, monarchs, family and arranged marries was the focus point of high society, and the bulk of armies came from lower classes. It is about as subtle political commentary as Monty Python, which is why drawing conclusions such as "the price of women's admission to the guardian class is that they must live like men" is supported by very loose ground. At best it is just show the cultural assumption of connecting war with masculinity, and at worst asserts that personhood and individualism is feminine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was very curious to see how this sounded.

They did a "great" job... for me, it's exactly ambiguous between a high- pitched male voice and a deep-pitched female voice. It's like the old "is it a vase or two faces?" illusion, or "which way is the ballerina spinning?" It keeps flipping in my brain.

But for the same reason, I would never choose it because it sounds so out-of- the-ordinary, an extreme outlier for human voices. When a computerized voice is speaking, I want it to sound "natural" (e.g. common, unexceptional) so that I'm paying attention to the message, not the voice.

Unfortunately a single "gender-neutral" voice turns out to sound quite uncommon, very exceptional. I only know a couple of people who sound like that, out of 1000's. I applaud the intention, but unfortunately I don't think it works in the end.

Regularly or randomly alternating between "average" female and male voices feels like perhaps a better practical solution, matching the two "humps" in the bimodal distribution of actual voice frequencies. [1]

[1] [https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01/language- pitch.html](https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01/language-pitch.html)

<comment><USER6> To be honest, it's not really all that unusual once you start paying attention to it — plenty of women have deeper voices than mine.

I transitioned from male to female some years back and trained my voice from a deep, masculine voice to one solidly in the female range. Pitch is only one aspect of how we gender speech, and I think that's why it feels off to you.

I would say this voice uses pretty male-coded speech patterns with a higher pitch than you'd normally hear a man speak in. The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds "male" to my ears.

<comment><USER7> >> The pattern of clear starts and stops between words and limited range of pitch used sounds "male" to my ears.

This sounds like an exaggerated stereotype of how men speak. Interestingly, the stereotype is different for men from Southern European countries who are said to speak in a sing-songy voice with vowels flowing together between words like vocal ligatures.

For example, this stereotype is used for satirical effect in the following strip:

[https://pbfcomics.com/comics/automatic- business/](https://pbfcomics.com/comics/automatic-business/)

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say it's particularly exaggerated; the "gay voice" is basically male pitch ranges with stereotypically feminine prosody and/or alliteration (I don't say this as a mockery at all; there's a documentary on Netflix that goes into the origins of this).

Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn't change the fact that a Spanish man sounds "gay" to most Americans.

<comment><USER7> >> Though I do agree that gender norms are largely cultural — but it doesn't change the fact that a Spanish man sounds "gay" to most Americans.

In that case, talking of a certain vocal style as being masculine or feminine, without a cultural qualifier, is meaningless. You should clarify that "this is how men speak in the US" or some such.

I don't know if I'd take a Netflix documentary as evidence that a stereotype is accurate.

<comment><USER6> There's ample SLP research and documentation on all of this and I think you're battling a straw man.

Edit: also your edit is just plain offensive. You have no idea what you're talking about.

<comment><USER7> I deleted my edit not because I agree that it is offensive but because it goes into personal detail that I find unnecessary.

Also, I discern in your comment the start of a certain aggression in such conversations that I find, frankly, disturbing. There is absolutely nothing in my comment that is addressed to you, personally, yet yours is becoming personal. To protect myself from what this can lead to, I will not contribute to this discussion any longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmmmm, I think there is more to gendered speech than pitch or frequency. It's about subject and delivery. Anyone a fan of The Venture Bros.? Dr Girlfriend is a female character voiced by a male actor (Doc Hammer) Although the given voice is that of a woman with an incredibly exaggerated smokers voice; think patty and selma from Simpsons multiplied by each other. The characters voice is obviously male but the delivery is effeminate which is why it works so well. At least I always heard it as a very exaggerated voice of a woman who smoked heavily.

My take on the voice? Sorry, to me it's an effeminate male voice. I hear a british woman overlaid with Fez from that seventies show. In fact I was on a flight yesterday with a very obvious gay male flight attendant who sounded very similar to this. Think man's voice with a little helium in the air.

<comment> purple-dragon > … a very obvious gay male flight attendant

I'm not a fan of these kind of characterizations. I can think of two things that make someone obviously gay: (1) they tell you, or (2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct.

Nearly anything else is probably a prejudicial stereotype.

<comment><USER9> This is indeed a complex theme, in part because how it is linked to negative stereotypes and in part because people might not realize they are sometimes reinforcing the negativity in them.

It is not controversial to say that an obvious metalhead is indeed a metalhead.

Also I would like to point out that "(2) you see that person engaging in homosexual conduct" is not that much of a silver bullet here, as bisexual and trans people exist too :)

Also sometime it is not hard to know more someone that they know themselves, I had a couple friends that were known to be gay before they knew themselves. And also "a very obvious gay male" does not mean homosexual to many people, in the last years society and the internet became much more mature in distinguishing masculine/effeminate stereotypes from actual sexual orientations. I have no idea of what went through GP minds, but I believe that being able to separate the "very obvious gay" from a description of a sexual orientation into a personality trait can be very beneficial for society in the long term.

<comment> purple-dragon If I can say it another, simpler way: I decide when and what I do with my body and what that makes me. No stranger's perception nor insistence can change that. However, repeatedly being subjected to such judgements over subconscious or natural expressions of behavior, whether voice, gait, etc., is a vehicle for psychological harm, much like gas lighting.

<comment><USER10> You can absolutely decide what you do with your body, but what it makes you is not solely your decision. Like it or not, what we are labeled as is partially determined by what society thinks we are.

Here is an extreme example to prove this. I can say that I am a chair, and I can argue this until I'm blue in the face, but that won't change the fact that others will think that I am a human, not a chair. More relevant to the conversation, let's say I am a man that only has relationships with other men. I can call myself straight all I want, but if I tell other people about my behavior, they will categorize that behavior by the behavior(homosexual), thus it will not always align with the categorization that I apply to myself(straight). Okay or not, it is human nature to behave this way.

<comment> purple-dragon That's my point. You can call me gay all day, every day because of my hypothetical lisp. That doesn't make it so.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but I was more responding to your post above saying "I decide when and what I do with my body and what that makes me. No stranger's perception nor insistence can change that." The perception of others does affect a persons categorization. Humans also categorize based on stereotypical behavior of things within a category, eg. lisp and swaying gate in gay men, long hair and lowered muscle mass in women, etc. These are all stereotypes that are found in a higher density within those categories, and often people within those categories change their behavior to align more with those categories(women intentionally growing hair out and wearing makeup) to accent category projection and improve accurate category interpretation in others(that is a woman). In this way, stereotypes aren't always prejudicial, it's more of the rigidity of the category interpretation that makes something bad, such as saying all men with lisps are gay, which is wrong.

I know this is quite a bit, but the main point I'm trying to make is that there is nuance in this conversation. Categorizations aren't always evil(though they can be), and are important social signals in our society.

<comment> purple-dragon I mostly agree, but it is lazy, sloppy, and unnecessary to combine "gay" and "flight attendant" at the hip as multiple people have done in this post.

As for deciding "what that makes me", I was trying to obliquely save room for the case another poster brought up, namely being gay or bisexual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds female, usually, but clearly wavers between male and female. Primarily though it sounds unpleasant to me. Not a fan.

<comment><USER12> This is [uncanny valley][1] applied to voice. They intentionally made a voice that listeners can't quite identify, and it ends up feeling unnatural.

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

<comment><USER13> This view of the future seems very bland and uninteresting.

I thought the idea is to make gender a flexible thing, for example you can experiment with being a female or whatever gender profile, based on whatever you feel comfortable with.

Not to reduce the worlds gender representations (in business, culture, etc) into a homogeneous middle ground? Expanding what's possible in terms of personal expression rather than (further) restricting it. So I'm very confused why this exists other than as an interesting technical project?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If we really want a genderless assistant voice bring back the novelty voices from Mac OS X like Zarvox, Pipe Organ, and Cellos.

[https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=186](https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=186)

<comment><USER15> A non-human voice is a valid goal, but a human non-gendered voice is a different thing.

Please recognise that agender people are both human and genderless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I mean no offense, but how is this really solving any problems? How is inventing a new voice many people are uncomfortable with really making the world a better place? A user configurable male/female voice could just work.

<comment><USER17> The idea, I think, is that it matters that/if we gender our digital servants—that as we use them more it will affect our sense of gender rolls. That Siri and Alexa are both female by default puts them in the stereotypical female-secretary roll.

I have Waze speak as a British male, of course then he sounds like a stereotypical butler. It would be fun if I could set it to be Batman or HAL9000, but it would probably get old.

<comment><USER18> I mean, to really address this problem, don't we need genderless employees in the workplace?

<comment><USER15> We already have them. I'm agender and I'm typing this from my workplace (during lunch).

The response to this AI voice demonstrates that a lot of people automatically hear any human(ish) voice as either female or male, one or the other. Similarly, people automatically recognise individuals as either female or male, one or the other. There's a very narrow band of presentation that _won 't_ be read automatically as one of those two options.

See how difficult it is to stop your brain from making automatic (possibly false) assumptions.

<comment><USER18> To be honest I don't understand what being agender means. I respect whatever presentation and choices you make for yourself even if I don't understand it.

I just don't think things having gendered presentation is an issue. There are many languages with a female sun, male moon, female Earth, male oceans, and so on.

I don't think making assumptions that are true of the vast majority is necessarily wrong. What's wrong is reacting negatively and rejecting someone like yourself who doesn't wish to participate in the concept of gender, and that's cool, but communication based on gender is still efficient in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure I see the problem with a voice assistant sounding male or female, and I certainly wouldn't buy this. It just sounds wrong, and I can't quite say why. I guess after all the work tech companies have put into trying to sound like a person, this deliberately doesn't.

Also, it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower. Even when I use the little drag thingy to pitch it as low as it will go, it still sounds female. I think most of us know pitch alone doesn't define voice, and that's clear from this.

<comment><USER20> > _it sounds blatantly female but pitched lower._

Concentrate harder; it also sounds like a high pitched male.

Basically, for me, I flip flop between two genders. For me, there is no such thing as "genderless" voice, just "gender meta-stable" at best.

Another thing to consider is that adult female voices sound like boy's voices. In animation, boy characters are often acted by women (who aren't doing anything to change their voices).

So "gender neutral" easily has the interpretation of "between boy and man".

<comment><USER19> > it also sounds like a high pitched male

I think it sounds feminine in a couple senses, but male in others:

* The speaker speaks less from the chest and more from the throat

* In terms of enunciation, females tend to speak more clearly on sounds such as "t"s, which can be observed here.

* The voice sounds a little more male in that the ends of many words trend lower in pitch, but more female in that they "bottom out" very early in the descent and dip heavily into vocal fry.

* There is less range of tone, which is more characteristically male.

All this aside, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually multiple people. And I suppose the fact that we all disagree is evidence that they're doing something right. But I think most of us can agree it still sounds really wrong in some way.

<comment><USER6> It actually does sound like they tried to blend multiple voices. It sounds very tinny and robotic; and not particularly non-gendered imo.

<comment><USER20> It does, but that is deceptive. Voice is determined by the pitch of the vocal tract and the spectral filtering caused by its shape: the "formant". Both can be manipulated digitally to create different voices.

I do perceive that there are abrupt transition in the voice as you move the so-called frequency slider; that could be due to abrupt changes in some parameters (like table lookup from a small table keyed to the frequency parameter or something).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Surely you'd refer to this as a "sexless" voice. Even if you believe that gender and sex are unrelated, voice is a product of your physical body and determined by sex. It's not affected by gender. In my opinion all this does is highlight that the "he or she" mindset is an unavoidable part of our reality, which is presumably the opposite of the intention.

<comment><USER22> Gender, ie cultural context, does in fact play a role on how we speak and both the pitch and intonation of how we speak.

You ever hear of upspeak/uptalking? Vocal fry? It's not so simple as just sex driven characteristics. (Although testosterone _does_ impact the development of vocal chords.)

<comment><USER21> Slightly, but what we consider male and female voices are correlated with sex and not gender. This is apparent in almost any transexual person, unless they happen to have an androgynous voice or physical alterations to their vocal cords.

<comment><USER23> Seems like it is affected by both, no? Transgender women tend to speak differently after they begin to transition.

<comment><USER21> And yet it's more often than not recognisable as a male voice. But anyway, they're not changing their gender, they're changing their sex. They will tell you that there were of the female gender before transitioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting concept, but it sounds slightly female to me.

I wonder what difference is there between male and female voices besides pitch (excluding cultural differences in way of speaking)? If some are exclusively binary, using or not using it will obligatorily lead to one or the other, and if so, a totally "gender" neutral voice becomes impossible.

(I used gender enclosed in quotes because I'm only talking about the general biological differences between male and female voices, not elements such as way of speaking, choice of words, etc)

Maybe one approach could be mix aspects from both male and female voice.

<comment><USER25> I've heard it's not just the average pitch that varies; female voices also tend have a wider range of pitch. In other words most men speak in more of a monotone than most women. Whether this is biological or cultural, I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It sounds feminine to me. I predict that the truth is in the ears of the beholder, and subconscious bias will cause people to sense a more masculine or feminine voice.

<comment><USER27> I agree, perception probably plays a lot into this. It seemed mostly feminine to me but wavered a lot between what I perceive feminine and masculine voices are. This doesn't seem like the answer but I agree with whoever created this in that it would be nice to have non-gendered computer voices. My reasoning is just that I don't want to give machines a fake gender - it's something that's always bothered me. That thing is not a him nor a her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hmm, I wonder if "genderless" will be more distracting than a clearly male or female voice. It seems unnatural.

</comment><comment><USER29> > I'm created for a future where we are no longer defined by gender...

That's not a world I want to be part of.

<comment><USER30> The key word there is defined. Defined by gender means boxed in by the expectations that being a male or female thrusts on us.

Ergo, that sentence sounds like someone is asking not to be boxed in by their gender.

Why is that not something you can support?

<comment><USER31> > The key word there is defined. Defined by gender means boxed in by the > expectations that being a male or female thrusts on us.

Identity is by definition a set of expectations. To lose those expectations is to lose a facet of identity.

There's a group of people who want to remove that facet of their identity, cool, I support them. But I like that facet of my identity, and I like the fact that most people around me also express that facet of their identity. I don't want want to be genderless or to live in a genderless world. Do not marginalise me for being that way.

<comment><USER32> Even a world where everyone can be defined by one of 75+ genders wouldn't be preferable, as the concept would lose all meaning and be just as bland in it's amorphousness. Gender is fundamentally tied to the expression and perception of biological sex, which allows it to have a meaning that goes beyond the self; genderlessness, and gender a la carte, are all about the self, not the greater society around it which depends on sexual signaling.

I have been a sort of outsider all of my life, but I don't think the extreme catering to the undefined individual is the best thing for humans as a group. If anything, it makes us more atomized, and I have yet to be convinced that individuals tend to happier when they have been maximally individualized.

People should have the freedom to not identify with gender, or want a gender neutral voice assistant, but I don't see how a genderless society is preferable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That pitch control isn't really controlling musical pitch. It seems to mostly moving the peak of a band-pass filter. The actual change in pitch is very slight.

Think about it; if you change the pitch of a note from 100 to 150 hz, that's should sound like someone is singing a perfect fifth interval. Nothing like that is heard here.

</comment><comment><USER33> It came across to me as slightly more feminine, I moved more towards the 140hz range to make it sound more gender neutral to my ears.

<comment><USER34> I don't know, I thought it was pretty spot on. I thought 140hz sounded consistently male.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> To those asking: the problem with gendered voice assistants is that they are almost always female. The argument is that this trains people to think of women as subservient, or things to be ordered around.

I love the idea behind this, although I don't necessarily agree that they have achieved their goal, but perhaps that says something about me more than it does about the service itself. To me, this still sounds like a female voice, just pitch-shifted.

<comment><USER36> > The argument is that this trains people to think of women as subservient, or > things to be ordered around.

But isn't that like people who assumed that violent games make people more violent (which was proven false in research)? To me this looks more like pushing some agenda trough from some activists in the gender debate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like an average 14-year-old squeker who's in the middle of puberty hurling out insults in a video games voice chat.

</comment><comment><USER38> Great, but there's a whole bunch of languages out there differentiate between male and female spoken language. Bit disappointed that it doesn't mention anything regarding that.

</comment><comment><USER39> Another vote for the voice sounding like a deep voiced Female.

Also, if their criteria for recording was what people "identify" as that's not going to help much.

They would need people who are biologically both, hermaphrodites, or neither, neuters (i.e. hormonally castrato). And given that humans are by default biologically female (i.e. without hormones a human becomes female) I'm not surprised the voice sounds female.

Also, their "future" of people not identifying as male or female (I assume they mean that most people would be like that, not a minority) is not a future I desire.

Having males and females makes life far more enjoyable (for most).

The minority where that doesn't work for them shouldn't have a problem with the fact that others are. Anymore than someone atheist should have an issue with someone religious.

People (or voices) don't have to be similar to you in order for you to interact with them.

</comment><comment><USER40> It doesn't sound genderless to me, it sounds like something that just fails to be both male or female.

What I actually find the weirdest is when my ears hear female, it hears something British or South African. When my ears hear male, it hears a more American voice.

So is this just synthesised from two different speakers with different accents?

</comment><comment><USER41> Typical meatbag voice. The future belongs to formant synthesis, I can easily get to 1000wmp without any loss of coherency and the sound is fundamentally inhuman.

[https://ufile.io/9905a](https://ufile.io/9905a)

<comment><USER42> I didn't quite catch that...

<comment><USER43> It's intentionally made to be hard to listen to. OP spliced multiple copies together with a slight offset, varied the rate while recording, and intentionally selected a passage which repeats very similar words in proximity, which further increases the difficulty.

> Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the > synthesized speech output is created using additive synthesis and an > acoustic model (physical modelling synthesis. Parameters such as fundamental > frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a > waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based > synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based > components.

<comment><USER43> Well either that or Espeak has broken something badly with their rate boost because wow, that's pretty terrible.

<comment><USER41> Standard espeak at 1000 wpm on the setting I put on the other comment.

eSpeak NG text-to-speech: 1.49.2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Huh. Cool, but I'm not really sure what problem it solves.

<comment><USER45> It doesn't solve a problem, it's just not "problematic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like the idea and I'm glad there is effort being put into this.

I imagine though if one of the big players would implement this we would see an insane amount of public debate and media coverage about whether the voice sounds like a man or a woman.

It seems like the typical "tech tries to solve social issues"

</comment><comment><USER47> Recently, United Airlines decided to allow for a non-binary gender option for booking flights. All the comments on social media were people screaming about how the liberal agenda was coming to get them, how there's only two genders, get over it, etc. "What, am I supposed to guess if that's a man or a woman sitting next to me now?!" But nobody is forcing these people to pick a new option. They can just select the one they've been selecting their whole lives. It literally does not affect them at all. But they still have an irrational hatred for an irrelevant option.

If some people want a genderless voice, yeah, I think tech companies should adopt it. If it makes someone more comfortable, and it doesn't harm me in any way, I'm not going to bag on it.

</comment><comment><USER48> It sounds female to me, but I like it. It sounds like something out of a ships computer in a sci-fi film.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is really good. I've been raising the voice from up and down to go from make to neutral to female and then let it drift in and out. I feel like that was the best. It was great paying attention to familiarity while also getting neutral.

</comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like a South African accent and a recording (or several) at that. Then some filters.

</comment><comment><USER7> That doesn't sound like a genderless voice. It sounds like a mix of gendered voices. You move the pitch up and down to make it sound more "male" or "female", and it's supposed to sound "genderless" when it has an equal mix of both. You can clearly hear the different voice strands superimposed on each other, like a sort of chorus.

In any case, a blend of male and female is still just a blend of male and female. Genderless should stand for something that is neither male nor female, and I can't really see how you can achieve that by mixing male and female in any proportions.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is awesome. My computer shouldn't need a gender. It's a computer.

<comment><USER52> A computer is a masculine noun in two of the languages that I use.

<comment><USER53> I'm sure you can find plenty of synonyms where it's feminine.

<comment><USER52> Indeed, at least in Russian the original term ("electronic calculating machine"),which was used before "computer" was adopted, was indeed feminine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The number of people saying that this voice sounds absolutely female is just an extension of the tendency to imagine anything even slightly deviating from the most stereotypically masculine as feminine by default. The one comment that I saw comparing this to a masculine voice was comparing it to a "gay flight attendant" that they had on a flight recently - and there, again, is the tendency to assume someone's gay just because they deviate slightly from the stereotypically masculine. The voice sounds genderless to me.

<comment> thraway-burnout Or maybe because it kinda does sound like a gay flight attendant.

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

<comment> purple-dragon It's disappointing to see you pull out such an easy, cheap, and tired stereotype.

<comment> thraway-burnout So there are no gay flight attendants? There isn't an overrepresentation of gay people within flight service?

I didn't say all flight attendants are gay – this is obviously not the case. But some are, and I've met quite a few of them. And if I try to average out their voice and mannerisms in my mind, it leads me to a sonic place that's close to this voice.

<comment> purple-dragon We're not talking about the same thing. There are likely gay people in nearly every occupation. That you think you can tell by their voice is ignorant and prejudicial.

<comment><USER45> One probably can't tell that with 100% precision, but the brain is a fantastic statistical prediction device that is specifically wired to make deep inferences from vocal patterns. I would imagine the correlation between "gay" vocal characteristics and actual homosexuality is close to 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It seems that most people don't really like the way this sounds, but honestly I had the opposite response. I despise the 'natural' sounding synthetic voices because there always seems to be something off about it. The fact that this sounds so weird is what I appreciate about it.

Perhaps one day we'll have natural sounding voices, but until then I'd always prefer a more artificial sounding voice. Something something uncanny valley, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER56> Even when I move the frequency near the perceived male area, it _still_ sounds female to me. There's more to voice than frequency alone.

</comment><comment><USER57> It sounds like a poor attempt at voiceover editing. It's nasally and monotone and dull and dreary. There's this strange vibrato throughout it all and there are sudden rapid shifts between a really low and high tone of voice. I'd honestly much rather have something blatantly robotic than this almost successful voice, because all I feel is that I'm being played for a fool.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is a solution in search of a problem. The overwhelming majority of people do not care what gender their digital assistant's voice is.

</comment><comment><USER59> Gender issues aside, speaking as a daily text-to-speech user this voice doesn't sound particularly natural or pleasing. The accent seems to constantly shift between American and British, and there is some weird audio phasing going on. It sounds more like a Hollywood director's idea of what robots should sound like than something I'd actually want to listen to.

</comment><comment><USER60> This reminds me of the audio clip where you can flip between whether you heard Yanny or Laurel: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio- clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> Sounds like female. Plus, even when I drag the bubble to the bottom, it also sounds like female but with an additional filter on it.

When I think about it, I've never heard anyone who is genderless, I've heard only male and female voices, so I wouldn't know how to compare!

The voice itself is well done. I'd use it, but in more "bubble to the top" form.

</comment><comment><USER62> The Hacker News crowd is very concerned about people "inventing something that doesn't need to be invented" when that thing strays anywhere near social and cultural issues rather than a shiny new startup or web framework.

If you're not sure what problem it solves, just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read, and, hopefully, consider.

<comment><USER63> _just google 'alexa female' and you'll get plenty of articles to read_

Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be offended by everything. If Alexa and Siri had male voices by default, I have no doubt that the same people would be complaining that tech bros are erasing the historical contributions that women made as secretaries and assistants.

<comment><USER64> > Generally from those who have decided that their job is to find ways to be > offended by everything.

You know, I never understood why people trot this idea out so often. It's so irrational.

If people were rational, they would say "hmm, X doesn't offend me, but many people say that X offend them; perhaps they have a point."

Instead, only those who are incapable of understanding their own confirmation bias say "All these people say that X offends them; how silly."

I think this is a highly irrational take.

The better take would be: "Some people seem to be offended by everything; other people are not. What are the principal factors of a person that go into predicting 'will this person be offended by X'?"

<comment><USER65> Keep in mind that a lot of the offense-taking you see happening publicly is done entirely on purpose. Think of it as adult/Internet equivalent of a child throwing a tantrum to see if they can manipulate their parents into getting what they want. In both cases, bowing down to the threats is not the right answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> It sounds like a deep female voice, not just in terms of frequency but timbre; perhaps a transwoman who has undergone a _lot_ of voice training. Even deepening it into the male range didn't eliminate the female timbre.

Colossus (from _Colossus: the Forbin Project_ ) arguably had a more genderless voice than this.

</comment><comment><USER67> What problem does this solve?

<comment><AUTHOR> "Technology companies often choose to gender technology believing it will make people more comfortable adopting it.

Unfortunately this reinforces a binary perception of gender, and perpetuates stereotypes that many have fought hard to progress.

As society continues to break down the gender binary, recognising those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.

Q is an example of what we hope the future holds; a future of ideas, inclusion, positions and diverse representation in technology."

<comment><USER68> If technology is needed to create this kind of voice -- IE it's not really natural, and as others have suggested it creates an uncanny valley of voice that confuses people, wouldn't that actually perpetuate the idea that there is a gender binary?

(I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't see that this accomplishes what you want it to)

<comment><USER21> Yes. You find contradictions all through this kind of belief system if you analyse it logically, because it's driven first and foremost by how people feel (or how people think others might feel).

<comment><USER69> The analysis of the social construction of gender is not derived from "feelings."

This technology is actually quite inconsistent with gender studies, which is why I find it quite baffling. Gender as an identity would imply that a female could have a deep gravelly voice and that a man could also have a higher pitched softer voice, as ones gender identity need not be dictated by their born sex or physical attributes.

This is quite fundamental to gender studies, making this tech not just useless, but completely counter intuitive to that project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It sounds like the creepy female changeling from Deep Space Nine but with a slight British twang.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's the least gendered synthetic voice I've heard but there is still a slight wobble between being first a hint more male and then a hint more female.

Also seems to me like it's somewhat camp - a neutral voice in that regard would also be worth exploring

</comment><comment><USER71> It sounds a bit like a vocal Necker cube illusion. (I.e. I find myself swapping between either male or female depending on how I am listening to it.) It's a bit like the Yanny/Laurel thing for me where I hear both.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm a big fan of this, as a non-binary trans woman. Also, it sounds like me ^^

<comment><USER73> no offense meant - no one sounds like this. record your voice and play it back side by side. there's some kinda uncanny valley effect at play

<comment><USER72> you're literally telling me what I sound like. that's one hell of a splain

<comment><USER73> splains is hard job

<comment><USER72> anything with the statistical frequency of splaining is unlikely to be terribly difficult work

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Next up: vocal synthesis of males and females replying in chorus.

</comment><comment><USER75> this is really cool. my personal reaction was to feel it was a little odd and off, but as I moved the Hz meter up and down it went from "oh a womans voice" to "oh a mans voice" pretty clearly. that is just plain interesting to know, I'd never seen how clearly quantifiable and single-axis that distinction can be. I bet if i spent a few weeks or so using a device in those Hz ranges i'd get used to it.

</comment><comment><USER73> Meh, as soon as assistant got it i switched to a masculine voice. it's still pretty reedy, i'd like something like terry cruz's voice baritone

</comment><comment><USER76> That's not Pat?

[https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl](https://www.google.com/search?q=pat+snl)

<comment><USER77> Yeah, I don't quite understand what the goal of this voice is.

Confident and helpful -- shouldn't that be the aim? Doesn't that sound different for men and women? And across different nationalities?

Q sounds unsure of itself to me... and just weird. I wouldn't prefer this voice to Siri or just about any of the old MacOS voices.

* Mac OS X TTS (Text-To-Speech) Voices - YouTube || [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4hqUxb9MmY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Sounds like a transgender or queer male person.

</comment><comment><USER79> I would have thought a deep learning approach trying to fool a classifier would have been a more politically neutral approach.

</comment><comment><USER80> This is neat, but I don't care if my AI's voice is genderless. I'm fine with whatever. I usually pick female.

</comment><comment><USER81> This actually worked for me. Sounded like the gender could go either way and the voice was pleasant enough.

I'd install it.

</comment><comment><USER82> Sounds awesome.

But calling something "Q" is a weird choice, considering a recent conspiracy theory

<comment><USER83> Can you elaborate to which recent conspiracy theory are you referring to?

<comment><USER82> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I'm on Safari and I hear nothing. I guess silence is ungendered?

</comment><comment><USER45> Sounds more feminine than Elizabeth Holmes, in any case.

</comment><comment><USER85> That doesn't sound like John de Lancie at all!

<comment><USER86> While we're at this, I'd rather prefer that my virtual assistant would be based on Majel Barrett-Roddenberry voice she used in ST LCARS voice (?) interface. Pretty sure she did record enough lines to synthesize her voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Sounds like a strong, independent lesbian

</comment><comment><USER88> This reminds me of Harrison Bergeron, a story about a dystopian future where any inequality is brutally suppressed.

</comment><comment><USER89> Nope, sorry. US politics have made me develop a reflex disdain for anything new named like that.

</comment><comment> black-tea This sounds fine to me. I don't care if a clearly artificial voice doesn't sound human. Computers should have their own voice.

I think the stated purpose is stupid, though. Gendered roles are good. They give people a purpose and make them happier. I really pity the little girls who get forced into things like engineering just because their parents wanted to be hip and "genderless".

</comment><comment><USER72> I would humbly suggest that the bevy of reactions to this innovation that amount to 'eww ugh this creeps me out' is evidence of precisely the cisheteronormative bias that this voice was designed to mitigate. I invite you to introspect about your (dis)comfort around folks who are gender- nonconforming.

</comment><comment><USER90> Imagine being triggered by your GPS devices voice

Grow up

</comment><comment><USER91> This voice sounds like a third gender to me: trans.

</comment><comment><USER92> Can we not pretend that a computer generated voice in a specific frequency range is some sort of political statement?

</comment><comment> thraway-burnout I rather a female assistant voice, because mothers in human societies are women, and we're hard-wired to find motherly voices more soothing.

This is getting out of hand, it's unnatural, fits strictly in the uncanny valley, and is borderline disgusting; both in terms of sound and in terms of politico-cultural values and intentions.

<comment><USER93> It's just a voice. You can dislike it without having to get worked up about it.

<comment> thraway-burnout But it isn't "just a voice", isn't it?

It's part of a socio-cultural Zeitgeist which actively combats values which I think are worth defending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> If I could bring somebody here from anywhere between 100 to 10,000 years ago, to show them the absolute state of society...

</comment><comment><USER95> This is a good step

I've given input on political issues as well as gender issues under multiple identities and personas to gain consensus

Almost no progress on consensus regarding political issues but on some sex and gender issues the male persona was unqualified to "mansplain" or had to much privilege to contribute or complain, where the same information was agreed upon and deemed helpful coming from the non-male persona - assumed to be female

This is more about the decision path people make to discredit a someone. When confronted with information that deviates from your script, people typically look for faults in the messenger instead of the actual information. You look for words that a different party would use exclusively to pigeonhole the messenger as the other, you look for other biases.

I felt that even if an A.I. was created to try to aggregate perspectives and offer its observations, people would try to disagree with it based on who created it. A valid criticism, but what would be left with to offer potentially unifying perspectives.

I like this and I imagine how it can be trained to create a voice that you agree with, but that nobody else would hear.

..... based on your cookies.

Then everybody gets to hear a different voice and mostly the same information - perhaps slightly different words as to not undermine the illusion.</comment>


DDos attack on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached/ <comment><USER2> Why are developers of popular database solutions so reluctant to write secure- by-design software. You would guess that some basic form of authentication should be implemented in any internet-facing service. But here we are, after the MongoDB fiasko, still left with thousands of vulnerable services because someone didn't bother to implement basic auth.

<comment><USER3> Because these tools follow the unix philosophy of building single use tools. There are a wide variety of authentication measures that can be composed with databases to secure them. There is really no need to build the authentication into the database itself and it fact doing so would violate a don't repeat yourself ethos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> previously (original github post): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16492832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16492832)

</comment><comment><USER5> The title is plain wrong. Oles from OVH posted a screenshot on Twitter around the same time with a DDoS attack that was even bigger:

[https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/969328679410110466](https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/969328679410110466)

<comment><USER6> I must be missing something, that looks about the same in severity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kinda funny to see packet capture being called "a little-understood forensic process" :P</comment>


Building Web Analytics at SpiderOak - <AUTHOR> https://spideroak.com/articles/building-web-analytics-at-spideroak <comment><USER2> [http://snowplowanalytics.com/](http://snowplowanalytics.com/) \-- this is an another Open Source project which you can use in house and a loads and loads of predefined metrics and documentation.. but I agree the approach here is simple and rock solid, plus you have complete control of it. Just wondering if JSOB datatype is used to store the unstructured data into Postgres?

<comment><AUTHOR> Snowplow looks very promising but we ruled it out because of the dependency on AWS. And we use the hstore data-type.

<comment><USER2> I did the similar thing but with nodejs to collect and process the events and Postgresql JSONB for storing the events .... i see the advantage on this approach is that i dont need to do much for structuring the data in node as i am just dumping this unstructured data directly into JSONB column , but i believe in your case you are structuring it first in Django and then storing it in hstore .. I totally agree with you about the Visualisation .. thats the hard part .. in my case i have totally unstructured events but still i managed to use a simple node app to give me the data back by querying JSONB .. was it easy to query HSTORE??</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Graphical Debugger for Sublime Text - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wvlia5/SublimeDebugger <comment><USER2> Nice! I've been thinking lately about moving away from Neovim back to Sublime or VSCode. More IDE-like features in a modular package (instead of a monolithic application like PyCharm) are always welcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll be giving this a spin. Looks neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks (y)</comment></comment>


GM's [new] dress code is only two words - <AUTHOR> https://work.qz.com/1242801/gms-dress-code-is-only-two-words/ <comment><USER2> Since the title is click-bait. The words are "Dress appropriately"

<comment><USER3> I thought clickbait was when the title leads you to believe one thing, but the content is actually about something very different? Am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> Here the title could have easily included the two words "Dress Appropriately", but forgoes a useful title to entice clicks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds bad. It's vague but it's not permissive. I'd be afraid they were changing overt rules for hidden rules.</comment>


Tesla's Musk qualifies for $2.1B payday - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-stocks-musk-idUSKCN24M2PL <comment><USER2> Last week he corrected people on this 'payday' usage, I think this is the same misusage.

He is allowed to buy the stock for this price, he does not have the right to sell it for 5 years, though.

So he pays taxes based on todays stock-price, but if it plummets he goes down with it getting nothing since he can't sell for 5 years.

So, sure, he's already rich and this will make his valuation much better. Over which he should pay taxes. But its not a payday in my view of the world when you can't actually buy anything for it since he can't sell those for 5 years.

<comment><USER3> He could use the stock as security for debt. That's a fairly standard practice by individuals who own a lot of stock in a company but don't want to show distrust by selling any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Eventually this bubble will burst and a lot of people will be out of their money.

How long until reality kicks in? This can't go in for ever.

<comment><USER5> It's potentially not a bubble but a bet against other car manufacturers who are

a) supposedly five years behind Tesla on some of the EV technology b) struggling to catch up

So, either Tesla continues to gain market share and expand into the SUV and pickup market or they end up licencing their technology - a win either way. The clock is ticking in Europe as far as diesel bans coming into force so they don't have forever to just do business as usual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess he'll be selling a bunch of Tesla shares to pay the tax on those options.</comment>


Mongolia: The best COVID-19 response in the world. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@indica/covid-underdogs-mongolia-3b0c162427c2 <comment><USER2> It's an impressive response, full credit. However, covid outcomes seem to be closely tied to NOx pollution and altitude adaption. Mongolia would be the canonical example of somewhere that is already altitude adapted, which gives you as much as 10x the blood concentration of NOx. So in theory, it would be really hard for someone from mongolia to even be symptomatic at any point.</comment>


Web hosting, but good - <AUTHOR> http://www.grobmeier.de/web-hosting-but-good-05052013.html

<comment><USER2> As shared hosting go, I think webfaction is second to none. They really manage to hit this sweet-spot between VPS and shared hosting, and you get the best of both worlds.

You get lots of stuff out of the box with an easy web-based interface[1], but if you really need some specific version or a package, you can do it too. Their support is fast and responsive and very helpful. They have servers in the US, Amsterdam and Singapore, and you can choose. You can even set up a fail-over server[2] quite easily.

I know I sound like a fanboy, but I truly like their service. Of course, for most of my stuff, I still use Linode/AWS, but can't recommend webfaction enough for shared hosting.

[1] e.g. you can choose the PHP version for your app from their web management console, as well as lots of predefined app templates (django, wordpress, RoR and more)

[2]<http://blog.gingerlime.com/2012/webfaction-fail-over/> \- a blog post I wrote about it.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - is webfaction doing some kind of Linux containers thing?

<comment><USER4> They use cgroups:

<http://blog.webfaction.com/2011/11/fair-shared-hosting/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone is looking for static file hosting, PHP or CGI, I strongly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net - I've been using them again recently and they're fantastic as ever (and incredibly cheap too, though less so if your site gets constant heavy traffic).

<comment><USER6> Just keep in mind that their hosting service is targeted towards people who know what they are doing, and they do not allow third parties to access your account, and they are _very_ serious about this.

If you share your login information with anyone for any reason at all, and they find out about it, they will disable your account.

We've had to rescue a couple of NFS.net users that have made a mess of things one way or another. Getting NFS.net users sorted out is a very-not-fun game of cat & mouse with NFS.net support. This isn't really a criticism of them though -- I like NFS.net overall -- just something that potential customers need to be aware of.

edit: went back through my email so that I could provide a more specific example. Owner of a small board game business had a website developed by his technical partner; technical partner hosted it with NFS.net and then became completely unavailable later on; website was then compromised and used for SEO spam (probably stolen FTP credentials / bruteforced lame password); business owner saw his website disappear altogether from Google listings with no idea of what was going on. He became our client at that point. While this was happening, his NFS.net-registered domain also expired, and the email address associated with his NFS.net account was at his domain (!). NFS.net support flatly refused to respond to any matters regarding his account from any email address other than the one at his expired domain, which couldn't be resolved until account access was restored, which was impossible as long as the domain was expired ...

Unfortunately, I don't have notes on how that particular one was resolved, but there are a bunch of domain transfer notifications shortly after -- I suspect we weren't able to ever resolve the trouble with NFS.net and resorted to something along the lines of transferring his domain, re-hosting it, and rebuilding his site from Wayback Machine archives or something. (He had no backups, of course.)

None of this is NFS.net's fault. There's a good argument in favor of the way they handle account access. On the other hand, with any other hosting provider, this could have been resolved far more easily. ("Tech guy set up my website and then disappeared" is unfortunately a common problem.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why I use Webfaction[1] for smaller projects. It's an excellent mix of command line and one-click Apache/nginx/DNS/email installers. I actually only found them because I noticed a few YC companies using their email servers.

[1] - <http://www.webfaction.com/?affiliate=mbesto>

<comment><USER8> I've been using WebFaction for more than 5 years and I've probably deployed more than 200 web apps on their servers. I am very satisfied by their performance and support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shared hosting is hard. Been there, it sux; you have to keep everyone happy with multiple versions of everything. By the end of it, it will look like the primordial soup. Whoever manages to do it and remain sane has my respect; shared hosting can still make quite a bit of money.

Personally I'd like to see stuff like Openshift[1] take off, maybe with a nice interface in front of it so it won't scare off "CPanel" users. It sounds like a nice compromise between shared hosting and "VPS".

[1] - <https://www.openshift.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I used OpenShift a bit, but there are (unfortunately) a little bit to many problems. For example, they provide only CNAME for mapping your domain. You then need to deal with <http://grobmeier.de> somehow to be the same with <http://www.grobmeier.de>. I decided that in my situation I would something easier

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who worked for another German webhosting company (not mentioned in the article but more than a million customers), I can tell you that it's extremely hard to roll out new versions of typical software (PHP, Perl, MySQL) when you both want to keep your users on the latest (or a reasonably recent) version while not breaking your users' websites. And because there will always be customers unwilling or unable to switch to later versions, you end up running Perl 5.6, PHP3&4, Frontpage Server Extensions (yes, people still use that stuff) and MySQL 4.

That said, Uberspace is still small enough to take care of their users individually when it comes to support. They can keep their architecture simple (well, so does 1&1, but rumor has it that they have 100 people working in their data center only to replace broken parts in their shared webhosting system), and text-only configuration files and not fully automating everything is still feasible and doesn't hurt yet.

Scaling webhosting while keeping up good customer service is hard. That's why your experience with small hosters will often be better.

<comment><USER11> With Uberspace you can determine the PHP version to use in a config file. You also run your own PHP interpreter, means you can use your own php.ini etc.

I fully agree with you on the scalability of the customer service though.

<comment><USER10> Yes, same thing in the system we built and maintained. But believe it or not, even an upgrade from PHP 5.x.y to 5.x.y+1 can cause existing software to break. With a million customers, some of them will hit even the most obscure bugs.

<comment><USER12> Is it not possible to completely isolate the two different versions? (Something like virtualenv for PHP?)

<comment><USER10> Providing them with individual versions that they configured isn't a problem at all, even on a per-directory basis. You can do that with Apache and some configuration.

The actual problem is more complex: you always have the conflict between wanting users to use the latest version (because of security issues or stuff like that) and not breaking the software they're running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually 1and1 is running 5.2. Some web software does meanwhile requires 5.3. After all software will break even when there is no upgrade at all.

Anyway, i fully agree: providing hosting is a hard business. Imaging what 1and1 needs to do for this huge server farm... wow. It's ok for a lot of low traffic sites without much functionality, but in my case I needed more at one point. Now I have the choice between 5.3 and 5.4. Thats neat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The wire transfer makes me think these guys are hosting auteurs or the like. They may have a small clientele that they cater to exclusively and personally.

As far as I can see, you really need VPS if you need that amount of flexibility. The only person you can count on to keep your stack up-to-date in the end is you. If you do it, you know what you did. All the host needs to do is make sure someone else's VM doesn't affect yours and bandwidth and power are taken care of.

Running a VPS is an order of magnitude simpler than managing individual software packages/libraries, conflicts and such per client and so you will generally get better service as a result anyway. "Here's a bucket. Do with it what you please (just nothing illegal or resource hogging)." Then you just have to worry about the time you spend on keeping your VPS up to date.

VPS packages are reaching the same cost that shared hosts had a little while back and if AWS isn't an option for whatever reason, it's the better pick.

Edit: I should mention that I use two different hosts. One reseller and one VPS. The reseller on shared is for users who need the nice admin interface for everything, "one-click" installs, DB admin GUI etc... and the VPS for personal stuff and a couple of clients.

<comment><USER14> > The wire transfer makes me think these guys are hosting auteurs or the like.

Or realise that to ask for 1EUR or more the fees they pay on wire transfer are much lower. WE encourage clients to pay us via bank transfer for this reason - it's free for us to receive with our bank, vs 0.20 + 2.9%.

Sure, we're not trying to do it in bulk (with the wrong reference numbers etc) but given (here in the UK and I imagine Europe) everyone pays their tax this way each year, it's not unusual.

<comment><USER13> Ah, I didn't think about that. I suppose all these little charges add up to more costs to the customers in the end. This saves you money, customers aren't too inconvenienced and existing familiarity is a plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do they have an english page? For some weird reason Chrome doesn't want to translate their page (<http://uberspace.de/>)

Edit: Nope. <https://twitter.com/ubernauten/status/331007821808279553>

<comment><USER9> [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fuberspace.de%2F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I <3 Uberspace. The service is great, the people are awesome. Jonas visited us at our Ruby Usergroup Booth on the Sigint last year and we talked about problems he had supporting ruby on the machines. Great guy!

<comment><USER17> Indeed, it's always a pleasure to work with them. Having worked with Jonas before, I can say that they are extremely competent and deliver great customer support. Ask a question by mail and you will get a detailed answer instead of random boilerplate text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not wordpress.com which would scale to better than almost anything else?

For anything more involved, get dedicated servers starting from 15 Euro/month from Hetzner or OVH.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need subdomains too. And because of time, I didn't want to deal with an own server. 1€ - that's pretty unbeatable. And the service... I mentioned it, it's fantastic. I simply like what they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They could have at least supported Sofortüberweisung. Apparently what they want is "echte, klassische Überweisung" (real, classic money transfer). Schade.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have found an easy with "Dauerauftrag". They automatically assign the money to your account. For me it works out well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you don't want to switch to a static site because of your wordpress theme, why not use wordpress.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, its not the theme. I use some plugins which use special tags. I would need to transform these special tags (like f.e. [javascript]) to an equivalent. This costs me a bit time for 181 posts, so I decided to delay. In the end it will become static. That said, I use subdomains a lot, i would miss them on wordpress.com</comment></comment>


The Task Manager in Windows 10 is pretty cool - <AUTHOR>

The Task Manager in Windows 10 shows great detail about what is and has been running and who is running what, clearly in real time. <comment><USER2> Neat.

Maybe some sort of actual blog post with a picture and some details, otherwise... what?</comment>


Ask HN: Finding open source collaborators (is the open source too fragmented)? - <AUTHOR>

There is a vast number of open-source projects out there. Which is certainly very good. From my undestanding most devs want to make something of their own from scratch. We come up with a lot of ideas on the way and sometimes seems easier to do it yourself than participating in someone else's project.  Also, "mine does A others does slightly A but also B and is much too complex" notions appear when you first may glance at a project. Of course all great things start small and prove their value through the community, one might argue, but wouldn't it be better sometimes to concentrate efforts on more "valuable" projects? What might be the channels of promoting (even advertising) open source projects and somehow rank their value? <comment><USER2> I think it depends. There are times in my life when I've wanted a tool and looked for existing products, contributed a few patches and been happy.

Then there are other times when there was nothing like what I wanted out there already. So I had to start from scratch. (My console-based mail-client, with Lua scripting is a prime example.)

Sometimes even knowing there are similar things out there it makes sense to write your own, for learning, for specific features that you know upstream would never support, etc. (Yes, I wrote another static-site generator. In perl. I also wrote a perl-based cfengine-like server-automation tool.)

In the abstract contributing to existing code might make sense. But for personal, or contractual reasons, it isn't unreasonable to set out on your own path.</comment>


World's First Facebook Page Cover Photo Scheduler? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagecovery.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Any valuable insights into this new facebook app? Possible to violate any facebook terms and conditions?</comment>