Posterous Swaps Blog Platform for Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/09/12/posterous-spaces/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

<comment><USER3> I really don't know how to feel about Posterous at this point.

When I signed up in the early days, it was awesome. They were the simple and concise, yet ridiculously powerful alternative to tumblr - <USER2> firstname.lastname@example.com, get a blog. I loved showing it to people because it was so amazingly simple.

I understand that wasn't quite enough to draw users in and they needed to evolve the product, but especially with this latest revision, my initial reaction was that I have no idea what Posterous is anymore. The messaging on the home page is terrible - "What's a space? A place for whatever!", and nowhere is the product itself shown.

As an existing user, my first reaction was to check my existing Posterous sites to make sure they were still blogs, and not Google+/Facebook-style Pages. And as a new user, I don't think I'd understand why I'd want Posterous in addition to Google+ or Facebook. (I understand that Posterous is better about privacy, but the competitors all claim that too, and Facebook never gave a shit about privacy - why would a new user believe Posterous?)

Again, I get they need to change their core product (or at least how it's positioned). I'm just really not sure a psuedo-social-network is the right way to go about it.

Even more than that, I miss the simplicity of "E-mail us anything. We'll post it for you."

<comment><USER4> It's interesting because I had the exact same initial reaction: uh-oh, did they change anything about my blog or group?

Personally, I almost never interact with posterous through the dashboard, but this move makes it seem that I'm either very much in the minority of their user base, or that they're no longer interested in serving my use case. Possibly both.

The net result is that where I would likely have used them without hesitation for another project I was planning on before these changes, now I feel like I need to look around and explore alternatives (including possibly reverting to a self-hosted WordPress blog).

<comment><USER5> Hmm, nothing has changed with sites and groups, this is a new way to display and interact with them.

They all have their own standalone sites just as they always did and are just as customizable as before. The main difference is that interacting with content across multiple sites is much more streamlined through the new interface.

<comment><USER6> Except they aren't called sites and groups any more. You're really underestimating how important labeling is.

EDIT: Lots of people want sites, lots of people want private groups, but no one wants a space simply because they don't know what that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was an early Posterous user (still active), long waiting for another shoe to drop. The missing social things (stream view, notification banner, having _others'_ content be your Dashboard, not your own old posts) seemed to be just sitting there, ready to be added at any moment.

The good:

So... the new dashboard view is better for presenting data that they already had "verbs" for. You can see new hearts (likes) to your posts much more easily, the default view is your subscriptions, not your own old posts (as it was previously).

Still needs work:

Discovery. There is no "regular" search, there is no tag search. The Find Friends just spins into time out for me. There is no directory or recommended Posterous spaces either.

[edit: Added everything below this line]

I'm generally hopeful. But I'm bummed that they really steer away from using the word _blog_ /setting expectations for blog feature development. The "Sharing stuff socially" space is crowded and well served at a rapid pace with Path, Google+, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, etc.

I really want blog services to have a modern social lens (like Tumblr). Right now Tumblr is the only place that comes close.

I think there's room for more than one social blog platform (there's clearly room for more than one social photo sharing site, music sharing site, etc).

Posterous initially seemed to be a social blog platform that wanted to build out some of the "regular" (WordPress) features missing from Tumblr, like commenting.

I wanted to live in a world where there was a minimal, control freak, beautiful platform like Tumblr... AND a more "swiss army knife" social blog platform like Posterous.

Since then, Posterous has done so many about faces (getting really email- centric among other things), that I have lost my initial read on them, but I like these new changes despite the fact that they're inching away from blogdom.

(sidebar: it's worth noting here that there is a 3rd social blog platform, <http://soup.io>. Soup.io, like Posterous, has long seemed to be on the verge of dropping another shoe.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Posterous used to be: Tumblr that worked, with better third-party service integration.

Not sure what it is now. That's a problem. I've stopped recommending it to people because I can't summarize it like this anymore.

<comment><USER9> I've stopped recommending when they didn't fix a bug I filed them MONTHS ago <http://zalew.posterous.com/test-if-posterous-fixed-the-bug>

just checked, and it still loses photos. I guess they were to busy being social to care about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just set up a Posterous account for my startup a few weeks ago because I heard lots of praise and recommendations about its simplicity and ease of use. While I haven't posted much up til now I was just about to get serious with it, then I saw this article and the changes.

At first glance things look quite a few of the options and features were stripped out and the whole experience has now become more complicated...

I understand the need to pivot and change their business model, but moves like this make me wonder if it was a good idea for them to do something this drastic (only because from all I've heard about the services it was primarily about its blogging features and its ability to share via other social networks) and if I should consider looking for alternatives to what was (and may still be?) a simple blog...

<comment><USER11> You can still use Posterous Spaces as a blogging platform. We haven't removed any of the features that make Posterous great for public sharing. We made everything simpler, more social, and added a great iPhone app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish they'd focus a bit more on some of the usability aspects of their core platform instead of this sort of thing, which is useless to me. For example, I still haven't figured out how to use the web interface to edit something I posted in markdown via email - the WYSIWYG editor seems to convert my markdown into literal characters. Or when posting audio I can't figure out how to control where in my post the markup for it goes. It seems to be inserted inside the first html tag, except when it isn't.

For all the talk about simplicity, I find these things do not fit my workflow very well, which is just write a post, add some tags, add some audio. I would be looking for a new platform except I don't want to have to upload all my audio files on a new site again.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Posterous Spaces" sounds just like Google+'s "Circles".

I never used Posterous for blogging anyway, but surely this is bound to piss off the bloggers already using their service? Unless "Spaces" is just an extension to their blogging platform, and the title is misleading.

<comment><USER11> You can still use Posterous Spaces as a public blog. Each space can be public or private.

We're solving a similar problem as google circles. The basic difference is that Posterous Spaces are symmetric sharing so all members of a space can post.

<comment><USER14> I see your trying to leverage the existing posterous to do it, which is good from the perspective of getting it going but could easily alienate a portion of the user base that were sold on the dead simple blogging message.

Sure these changes may still allow them to do the same thing but the shift in terminology and organisation will be hinting to people the direct things are going which is away from their use case.

Granted this new niche might be a good direction, the HN crowd are hardly a good sample of opinions for something like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, their new logo looks a lot like the Microsoft Office logo.

Compare: <https://posterous.com/>

with: <http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Just had a rather puzzling email exchange with the folks at Posterous concerning the lack a easy/direct access to emailed posts to edit and tag existing posts, especially "drafts".

I asked - "Can I ask why not just have a "manage Posts" button, menu item, or tab on the opening page after signin? Thought the idea was "ease of use"."

The response - "We do appreciate the feedback and will consider it for future updates, but it is not the direction the developers have chosen to take at this time."

Puzzling because I've never heard a company say that "ease of use" was NOT the direction they intended to go.

Disappointed blogger, looking to move on.

</comment><comment><USER17> I moved my personal blog last night, before this change. Perfect timing, I know. At lunch today I went to cancel my posterous blog and I was puzzled. It had become a "space", and I couldn't find a way to delete it. I had to delete my account in the end. I'm very glad I made the move to self-hosted WP now.

Posterous had a few good ideas, but as far as blog platforms go, it was too limiting. They should have focused on improving their core business, instead of transforming it into a half-assed Google+.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow I seem to remember in the blurb that accompanied the horrible new dashboard (that assumes it knows all about us and who we want to share with and will nag and nag and nag until you conform to their way) something about pages loading 3 times faster. Either my computer has suddenly developed problems or they made a typo and it should have been 3 times slower.

I can't even delete a page. Gutted because I moved a lot of stuff here from Slinkset (which was awesome, although not a blogging platform). I had to because Slinkset closed down after being bought up by Posterous (why buy something so you can destroy it ? What am I missing here ?). Now I have to work out how to move everything on again. Let's hope Posterous are as amenable about you exporting your blogs to other platforms as they are about you importing them.

I'm tired of this sort of thing.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Een schip op het strand is een baken in zee."

Posterous should have taken notes from previous sharing sites/functions: Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Google Buzz, etc.

If you change things drastically, your userbase gets mad, and they seek out alternatives. I tend to see social sharing sites as a home online. You put many of your meaningful items there, and you get comfortable with a certain layout, a given set of functionalities, etc. If someone were to come and redecorate/reorganize your room or house without your permission, you'd probably be a little upset.

Facebook eventually mastered the art of introducing change into its site. Nudging the user to try something new ("X of your friends are using the new layout. Join them!") instead of forcing it on them seems to be a better policy.

</comment><comment><USER20> The description of what it is feels like a Tumblr with Google+ privacy settings, which is a cool feature. One thing I've always wanted was for my Posterous blog sites to have an RSS feed for just that site instead of forcing users to follow me and have an RSS feed of their reader.

</comment><comment><USER21> And still they have the world's smallest body font.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally someone has a story about it! The iPhone app updated this morning and I couldn't' find any details about it (my tweets were the only mentions of it in Twitter search).

</comment><comment><USER23> It's a bit dated now, but I think this is still the best take on why Tumblr did better than Posterous:

<comment><USER24> Is anything coming after the colon in a subsequent edit? The problem is not in my device, I guess.

(I don't try to sound funny, I really am curious what you have to say about these two services.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The transformation to MySpace is complete.

<comment><USER26> You mean tumblr?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They should also change the name. It turns out that failpivot.com is available.

</comment><comment><USER28> desperate attempt. Who really needs another social network ".....but were different than G+/FB/and twitter" ...total FAIL</comment>


Getting down to the nitty-gritty of reduplication - <AUTHOR> http://ahdictionary.tumblr.com/post/170649143046/getting-down-to-the-nitty-gritty-of-reduplication <comment><AUTHOR> I became aware of this first in Japanese and hadn't really thought about it in English or other languages. Makes sense that it would be a more general feature of language than specific to any single one.</comment>


Oracle hiring more than 5000 cloud professionals in the US - <AUTHOR> http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Oracle-Hiring-Five-Thousand-Cloud-Professionals-in-the-United-States-1001625387 <comment><USER2> A quick search on their website[0] shows a _grand total_ of 1,602 jobs _anywhere_ in the USA for which the _word_ "cloud" appears _anywhere in the req_. Perhaps the database is corrupted?

[0] [https://oracle.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobsearch.ftl?lang=...](https://oracle.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobsearch.ftl?lang=en)</comment>


Show HN: Email templates for onboarding your customers - <AUTHOR>

We have put up a bunch of email templates that can be used by Saas businesses here:
http://nudgespot.com/nudges/schedule-a-demo?tag=saas
Would love feedback from HNers, are these templates useful? <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link:

[http://nudgespot.com/nudges/schedule-a- demo?tag=saas](http://nudgespot.com/nudges/schedule-a-demo?tag=saas)

</comment><comment><USER2> Was hoping these were email layouts. Still cool though!

<comment><USER3> There are enough free email layout templates out there, but I never know where to start with the content.

This will be enormously helpful to me. I hope they expand to other types of customer related emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> What other type of emails are you looking for? We'll try to add them.</comment></comment></comment>


The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame: Philips UcD Audio Amplifier - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/the-consumer-electronics-hall-of-fame-philips-ucd-audio-amplifier <comment><USER2> "classes A and AB work by making output transistors conduct more or less current depending on the input signal. The scheme works very well, but it produces a lot of unwanted heat."

This is a white wash..

Class A gives you 100% of the original signal, Class B and onwards represent an ever degrading of the original signal.

If you are interested in quality of the signal you don't want anything to do with a Class D amplifier.</comment>


Do You Think Linux is Secure? - <AUTHOR> http://ostatic.com/blog/do-you-think-linux-is-secure <comment><USER2> Linux is more secure than Windows due in large part to its openness and the security-minded users. Like all software, however, flawless logic does not equal secure software, no matter how open source it is. The user is the biggest variable as this does not prevent him/her from misusing the software (even if it was flawless). Both software and user would be negated on a fault- tolerant platform - which does not currently exist.</comment>


Americans Don't Care About Prison Phone Exploitation, Says FCC Official - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/fcc-official-most-americans-dont-care-about-prison-phone-exploitation <comment><USER2> What they don't mention in the article is that inmates aren't able to call cell phones. Earlier this year I had to bail out a friend arrested from a traffic stop.

He wasn't able to successfully complete a call to my cell. After he said his name and it told me to press 1 to accept the call, it would just disconnect. Frantically trying to figure something out because I know they don't give you many calls. I ended up having to "add money" to my account just so he could call my cell phone and tell me where he was so I can contact a bailsman.

I had to pay money just so he could make his free phone call to retain a lawyer or a bail bondsman.

EDIT: This is the company I had to pay [https://web.connectnetwork.com/](https://web.connectnetwork.com/)

<comment><USER3> Not always the case. Connect Network services county jails and I know for a fact they allow calling of cell phones (requires person on other end to set up an account so it takes a couple of minutes to connect) I assume it depends on the area and the contract.

<comment><USER4> Requiring the called party to set up an account might be easy if she just happens to be sitting at her desk when the call is made, but it could be much more onerous in other situations. Regardless, this breaks the standard expectations that humans have for using a phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> in the recent story on NPR about a young Mexican guy dying (ruled suicide) in the privately run ICE detention center it was mentioned that the attempts of the relatives to reach him on the phone were unsuccessful as the center's employees were not able, for some unknown reason, to call the guy to the phone, and instead the center's employees suggested to the relatives that the relatives have to put money in the detainee's account first and after that the detainee would be able to call them himself. The motivation here is pretty obvious to anyone who knows about the outgoing rates from the detention center and who profits from it. Practically the definition of extortion.

<comment><USER6> It is unfortunate that large amounts of money are not made available to reform the prison system. It seems that society is on autopilot, with people being led into a meat-grinder. Moral activation seems necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Bible has many admonishments about being kind to prisoners. [https://www.openbible.info/topics/prisoners](https://www.openbible.info/topics/prisoners)

<comment><USER8> I dont see why the Bible needs to be taken into consideration here. I understand wanting historical perspectives for policy, but religion shouldn't be needlessly shoved down people's throats.

<comment><USER9> Is a link really pushing religion down your throat?

If it was a Muslim majority country we would were discussing a link to the Quran that gives context would be useful.

<comment><USER10> Invoking religion in what should be secular discussions regarding public policy can definitely be perceived as pushing religion down people's throats. Imagine the opposite -- if every time a group of people were seen chatting about religion, someone walked up and quoted some famous atheistic reference?

However, I don't see an iterated discussion of this as a useful tangent for the thread to take, so let's discuss instead how religious philosophies of all kinds could or should have informed the believers of those religions in the issue of prisoner treatment. What leads to the dichotomy between religious messages of peace, and the warlike behavior of some adherents to those religions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The FCC did cap rates. They revised the caps upward after being sued by the two main prison phone service (such as it is) providers. The caps look pretty high but I guess that means rates were really high before they were capped.

But it remains one more of the ghoulish practices that crop up when there is an opportunity to profit from misery.

</comment><comment><USER12> Textbook case of rent seeking and regulatory capture. Two companies are competing against each other, not on price or service to the consumer, but on which can manipulate the regulator the most effectively.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's an interesting take, in reality the people who care are poor and don't have the resources to make their voices heard.

<comment><USER14> Americans overall seem to have a hard "punishment" stance towards "criminals". Just look at all the rape jokes regarding prisons. While some might just be for laughs, a lot of it, I think, underlies the idea that prison should be super hard and punishing. People are fine saying "hey you broke the law, I don't care if it's not hard to make phone calls!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a local (to me) Vegas startup trying to help people communicate with prisoners - [https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/pigeon- ly/](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/pigeon-ly/) \- they bring up a good point that these people will be asked to reintegrate with society and to best do that we need to help them remain a part of it with regular communication with friends and family. The prison phone system runs entirely counter to this ideal.

</comment><comment><USER16> The non-profit Prison Policy Initiative does a lot of research on these issues and petitions the FCC for changes. This page summarizes a lot of their efforts ([http://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/#price](http://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/#price)). Their other publications are available at [http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports.html](http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> The only thing that you have to determine is which political campaigns are these two companies donating the most to. Then you'll know why this isn't being changed.

<comment><USER18> > By voting against the caps, [Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly] voted against > 2.7 million children who are just trying to stay in touch with their > incarcerated parents.

Both Republicans on the panel.

I included the 'think of the children' bit to illustrate how easy it is to turn a persuasive argument into a blatantly manipulative one.

<comment><USER19> Hillary has taken $133,246[0] from prison lobbyists. Her husband admitted guilt for the state of the current prison system[1] and famously Hillary publicly supported[2] those very same policies with rather fear mongering speeches. I'd argue the corruption is rather bipartisan.

[0][http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/bernie-sanders- wil...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/h-a-goodman/bernie-sanders-will-ban- private-prisons_b_9297568.html)

[1][http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/politics/bill-clinton-crime- pr...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/politics/bill-clinton-crime-prisons- hillary-clinton/)

[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXulk0T8cg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXulk0T8cg)

<comment><USER20> Donation does not immediately imply corruption (on either side of the political spectrum). Especially one as small as this one.

It does bring moral questions, and it is worthwhile to think about limiting the power of "donations" in politics, but people can hold an opinion that we dislike even before receiving a donation. The question is whether they will change their opinion when confronted with data.

<comment><USER21> What does corporate donation to political parties imply?

No, fuck that. Corporations should be banned from giving money to political parties. Our politicians are supposed to represent _our_ interests as _citizens_ , not our interests as corporations and their employees.

I'm open to changing my mind on this matter if anyone can provide many strong examples of where corporate donation to political parties has lead to demonstrably better outcomes for people at citizens.

<comment><USER22> > Corporations should be banned from giving money to political parties.

Corporations _are_ banned from donating to either candidates or national party committees (DNC/RNC).

What they're not banned from doing is spending money independently to promote political causes. And I can give you a good example of why that's not a bad thing: had _Citizens United_ gone the other way, the government could have banned the tech company protests against SOPA/PIPA.

<comment><USER23> Serious question: let's say they DID ban corporations from protesting against particular proposed laws. Would the outcome necessarily be worse for the people of the US overall?

<comment><USER22> Yes. Corporations are a bulwark against oppressive government. The rise of the commercial class led to the downfall of feudalism and the rise of democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Prison rape and other violence, either.

</comment><comment><USER25> While at ma bell the prison collect program was always "over there" like programs that managed recording and rating gov't ld lines

In the pre cellular days we always thought prison collect was high but so was charging .37 per minute to any light user.

Overcapacity and cell phone Ubiquity never made it to private networks like prisons.

</comment><comment><USER26> How do I show the FCC that I care about this???

<comment><USER6> I also wish to know this

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> America, doing it wrong since 1776.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wouldn't mind if the state was collecting the money. Prison is a punishment and you shouldn't be able to just chit chat all day. However, letting two private companies cash in is corruption.

<comment><USER29> > _Prison is a punishment_

Beside the points others made here that it isn't, and it _shouldn 't_ be, I'd like to invite you to think about the ethical and _practical_ implications of punishing someone over, and over, and over again for years or even decades, for an action that usually took only a very, very small fraction of time compared to the length of "punishment". The very idea flies in the face of... well any kind of experience with people and how they learn.

<comment><USER30> Retributive justice isn't for the the criminals, it's to deter other crime.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice#Principles)

Personally, I think we've gone too far down the 'retributive' route without corresponding investments in rehabilitation, but a lot of Americans prefer to lock the door and throw away the key.

<comment><USER10> Does it actually work for that, though?

<comment><USER30> Well, comparing criminal justice models is by definition difficult since it's deeply embedded in the society.

You can look at other societies where they spend more time rehabilitating offenders (e.g. Norway), and Norway does have lower crime rates, but which way does causation run? You can argue that rehabilitation lowers crime rates, or you can argue that low crime rates makes the society tolerant of relatively lenient punishment.

And if it turns out that retributive punishment _does_ work effectively, are you willing to pay for increased crime rates just to find out that our current system is alright?

<comment><USER10> _And if it turns out that retributive punishment does work effectively, are you willing to pay for increased crime rates just to find out that our current system is alright?_

This type of what-if paralysis isn't rationally supportable. Some similar examples to show where the logic fails:

And if particle accelerators do produce black holes, are you willing to destroy the planet just to prove it?

And if it turns out Cthulhu does live on the moon, are you willing to unleash its wrath by visiting?

Instead of paranoid fear of worst-case hypotheticals, we should be using empirical evidence to guide decisions. We can look at other countries. We can look at differences between states and counties. We can conduct experiments in smaller areas and roll them out over time if they work. Or we can just have some basic human empathy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pakistan to ban single-use plastic bags - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pakistan-moves-to-ban-single-use-plastic-bags-the-health-of-200-million-people-is-at-stake/2019/08/12/6c7641ca-bc23-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html <comment><USER2> Meanwhile in the U.S., the GOP is banning the banning of plastic bags (hopefully soon to be undone by the new Democratic majority in Michigan).

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2016/12/30/yes-this-is-real-michigan-just-banned-banning- plastic-bags/)

<comment><USER3> Banning plastic bags is bad policy that promotes resource waste and food contamination.It's a rolling back of the gains from sanitation that we've made, for no purpose other than muddle-headed virtue signaling by people who can't be bothered to learn the facts before passing their intrusive bans.

[https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726035361/why-banning- plastic...](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726035361/why-banning-plastic- grocery-bags-could-be-a-bad-move)

[https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just- bad-...](https://fee.org/articles/banning-plastic-bags-isnt-just-bad- economics-its-bad-for-the-environment/)

<comment><USER4> As a policy in action in Kenya, I'd say that it is working. (We have a ban that has been in place for more than a year). practically everyone at the supermarket uses reusable bags compared to pre-ban mentality of 'oh I'll get yet another bag at the till'.

<comment><USER5> And don't said reusable bags cost thousands of times the carbon emissions of single use plastic bags? So unless you use your reusable bags for years and years, you won't break even.

<comment><USER6> "So unless you use your reusable bags for years and years..."

That is literally the exact point of reusable bags. The hint is in the name.

<comment><USER3> The issue is how do you sterilize the bags between re-use to achieve the same level of hygiene as disposable bags? Doing that is very energy intensive and you are in a situation in which the energy cost of washing a bigger reusable bag is comparable to the cost of making a brand new plastic one. That is why I was emphasizing sanitation. We don't use disposable needles, containers for meat and produce, dairy, because they are cheaper per se, we use them because we are concerned with hygiene.

And of course the larger issue is the totalitarian nature of this. Who needs two cups of coffee? Ban the second cup! This idea that we should start using the government's monopoly on violence to ban what are symbolic and irrelevant things -- even without thinking through the repercussions for sanitation and energy -- is a very dangerous one.

<comment><USER7> No one will look out for the environment we live in, especially business. Try living with re-use bags for a month and find out just how inconvenienced you are...we as citizens are making these laws to live in a clean sanitary world, not Some unnamed totalitarian regime.

<comment><USER3> No, you are doing it to _feel good about yourself_. You are doing it to _feel_ like you are making the world better.

But you are not making the world better, you are forcing random laws on people as part of an empty performative ritual.

If you wanted to live in a cleaner world, you would focus on _improving systems of sanitation_ rather than trying to force a very marginal reduction in waste going into these systems.

90% of the plastic in the ocean comes from 10 rivers in India and Asia. The plastic is in the ocean because of poor garbage pickup and disposal infrastructure, it's not there because some guy in San Francisco is using a single use plastic bag when he goes shopping. If you want to make the "world" cleaner, then improve the waste management infrastructure rather than trying to reduce plastic waste by 0.000000001%. The thin disposable bags are not gonna put you over the top.

These are all symbolic acts that have real world deleterious consequences in terms of personal liberty as well as increasing the number of food poisoning cases, emergency room visits, etc, due to people re-using bags without properly sterilizing them between each use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope it works. The problem in Pakistan is trash in general, Pakistan needs a country wide "don't litter" campaign, sort of what happened in many developed countries.

Plastic bags just happen to be the most pervasive and visible source of trash.

There aren't many places to throw trash, the norm is to just throw trash anywhere outside your house. Even the more upscale suburbs in the big cities have essentially no trash cans, and the garbage collection areas are open dumps, so plastic bags fly all over the place.

The trash is sometimes picked up and burnt, or other times just burnt in place, and the smell is toxic as there is generally a lot of plastic.

The whole plastic bag problem has a huge cost on basic city infrastructure: In most of Karachi, every drain and sewer pipe is either choked with plastic bags, or has just been cleared and will get choked again in due time. And so every time it rains, the city floods, and there is a grand proclamation of building more drains and sewers.

In North Pakistan, around the most remote and beautiful lakes, ones where no one lives as they are too high and remote, many have plastic bags scattered all around, most I assume carried there by the winds from nearby towns/villages, as some of the ones I visited don't get enough visitors to have thrown the amount of plastic bags I saw.

Visiting places (again) which used to be pristine not that long ago really hit home how much we humans have spread our "stuff" everywhere.

Edit: The ban is a bit too harsh. Should have been rolled out slowly, to give ppl more time to adapt, like targeting larger stores (which are in the tax net and thus easy to monitor and punish) and then rolling it to other stores, and finally everyone.

<comment><USER9> My cousin to me walking on Tariq Road while tossing a plastic bag; "Who cares, this isn't New York or America"

Me: "Yeah, and it never will be with that attitude"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> dang (or some moderator) should correct this headline; the ban only applies in the Islamabad Capital Territory

<comment><USER10> You are correct. But there are similar bans either already implemented in other provinces or in the works. See for example

[0] [https://www.dawn.com/news/1498790](https://www.dawn.com/news/1498790)

[1] [https://propakistani.pk/2019/04/30/cm-usman-buzdar- announces...](https://propakistani.pk/2019/04/30/cm-usman-buzdar-announces- plans-to-ban-plastic-bags-in-punjab/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> They banned single-use plastic bags where I live. Now every place has "multi"-use plastic bags which are 10 times thicker and cost a nickel. I have yet to see one of these bags being re-used.

<comment><USER12> If we make then extra thick maybe the wind will not scatter them all over the place and gathering will be easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is interesting as what I've seen in other developed countries is a very efficient use of plastic bags. Most things you buy that need a bag (salt, rice, etc) come in a super small and thin plastic bag.

Far more efficient than the packaging we have in the west which tends to be either super thick paper or super heavy plastic bags with added packaging on top.

<comment><USER8> The flip side of thin bags is that often people end up double (or triple bagging!) heavier stuff, or things likely to leak, or just cause they don't trust using only one bag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If all the food items in a supermarket came with a built-in loop, you'd just run a rope through the loops and you could carry as much groceries as you can lift, without needing a bag.

<comment><USER15> The loop that, if strong enough, would consume more plastic than a bag? For every single item? I mean, I loved your idea when I first read it, clever. But loops aren't cost-free, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There should be more countries who are also taking these steps in order to help reduce waste and help the environment. We are fully aware of the harm plastic bags cause and there are many other alternative including paper or reusable bags.

<comment><USER17> I thought paper was just as bad, if not worse, because it takes more energy to produce. [Here's a random site about it[1], though please note that I've done pretty much nothing to vet the information.

I reuse plastic bags (garbage, traveling w/ liquids, picnics), and if I have a bunch of extras, I take them to the grocery store, where they have a recycling bin for them. I don't know if they actually get recycled (I read that they often end up in the landfill regardless), but there's a chance. I rarely get too many though because most of my shopping is at Costco, which doesn't provide them.

I disagree that a ban here is necessary or useful. I use them quite a bit, so at least for me, I'll be producing "more" waste because I'll need to buy new bags instead. Paper bags aren't as useful (can't hold liquids, are more rigid, break easily), and I always seem to forget my reusable bags.

I wish more stores would follow Costco's lead and reuse those cardboard trays, which are just as useful for carrying groceries to/from the car and are obviously recyclable and biodegradable. Honestly, I prefer them most of the time because they keep things from rolling around, I can carry more in one trip to the house, and it's easier to see where certain things are for organizing later.

What we need isn't a plastic bag ban, but maybe a tax on them based on the cost of cleaning up discarded plastic bags. It costs $0.05-0.15/bag to buy small garbage bags (bathrooms, office, etc), so the tax shouldn't be more than that. Charging for plastic bags seems to work[2], so why not just do that instead of a ban? Those of us who find value in these bags can continue to use them (I love them for dirty diapers, rotten food, and other stuff that shouldn't hang around the house for days), while those who don't can use other bags.

[1] [http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplastic.html](http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplastic.html) [2] [https://neweconomics.org/2016/09/why-the-plastic-bag- charge-...](https://neweconomics.org/2016/09/why-the-plastic-bag-charge-is- working/)

<comment><USER18> Is there a giant swirling mass of paper bags in the Pacific Ocean?

Do paper bags hang from trees and phone lines for _years_?

Do paper bags cause enormous damage from clogging up sewers and sewage processing plants?

They don't.

<comment><USER19> >Is there a giant swirling mass of paper bags in the Pacific Ocean?

I'm quite sure there's no giant swirling mass of plastic bags in the Pacific Ocean.

Sure, there's a huge amount of plastic pollution there in gyres, but it's not from people using plastic bags at the grocery store in middle America. It's from stuff like shipping containers blown overboard, and various other trash that has gotten into waterways.

Your other points are sound I think, but not this one. If you want to complain about the gyres, then you need to take aim at ALL plastics and discuss banning them ALL. That'll basically set our technology back to the early 1900s or so.

<comment><USER18> The problem is if a plastic bag ends up in the ocean it never really breaks down or degrades. Turtles tend to eat them since they look like jellyfish, and this causes enormous knock-on problems when turtles start dying from eating too much plastic.

Turtles could eat paper bags all day and probably be fine.

They may not be the #1 contributor to the Pacific Garbage Patch, but they're a component of it.

<comment><USER19> My point is that plastic bags from most places in America are not winding up in the ocean. They sure as hell aren't getting to the ocean from people in Kansas being sloppy with plastic bag disposal. There's a lot of problems with plastics in the oceans, and I have a hard time believing that plastic grocery bags are one of the major contributors.

But as I said somewhere else in this discussion, I think all these grocery bags should be made of the corn starch plastic that breaks down quickly, and I'd like to know what those weren't mandated since they've been around for at least 20 years now.

<comment><USER18> Canada just got on with a ban on single-use plastic items ([https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single- us...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-single-use-plastics- as-early-as-2021-source-1.5168386)) which presumably includes plastic bags.

Single use non-plastic items made of other materials like corn starch would be interesting, but they're going to have to be sure to not brand them as "plastic".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tangential, but India insists on thicker plastic bags for recycleability. And yet we have seas of plastic bags and bottles floating around. Would we be better off with thinner burnable bags and clean incinerators?

</comment><comment><USER21> The laws of unintended consequences.

Banning plastic bags in San Diego led to a Hepatitis A outbreak.

[https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers- pl...](https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-plastic-bag- ban-led-hep-health-crisis/)

2nd and 3rd order effects are not so easy to anticipate.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally some smart people, it should have been done years ago and not only in Pakistan but all across the world. The nature sends us obvious signals that it is not okay what we are doing and we need to take serious actions.</comment>


And Now There's A Kickstarter For Porn - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/and-now-theres-a-kickstarter-for-porn/

<comment><USER2> Well, since the adult industry is in the game, we can rest assured that crowd sourcing definitely has a (big) future :-)...

<comment><USER3> I hate to think what kind of prizes will be offered for the higher contributes..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gives a whole new meaning to 'seed capital', eh.

</comment><comment><USER5> "I would love to say Offbeatr was a totally original idea, it's not."

Who cares? Why is this even relevant? Originality does not matter in business.

Google was not the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. And if the competitive advantage of your business relies on having an original idea (not saying that kickstarter is this type of business), then you don't have a defensible business model.

<comment><USER6> Ben Tao (the person quoted in the article saying that) responded to your post, but you might not have noticed because his account (newchimedes) was hell- banned from Hacker News a few months ago. To see his posts you will need to turn on "show dead" under the settings for your account. He has another comment lower on this article as well.

(I bring this up only because I have made it a habit/goal to collect the names of users that have been hell-banned, as I consider the mechanism of hell- banning to be broken and the effects on the community to be negative, not because I am defending or backing either of your points: I haven't actually read your comments in detail, or the article.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given how much the porn industry has given to the rest of the web in terms of leading the way in areas such as e-commerce, streaming and so on, it's nice that the non-porn industries can give a little back.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's probably sme fascinating sociologogy/psychology papers that can be written if this takes off.

Also, cockstarter?</comment>


Amazon Aurora: Parallel Read Ahead, Faster Indexing, NUMA Awareness - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-update-parallel-read-ahead-faster-indexing-numa-awareness/ <comment><USER2> We've switched 6 or 7 of our production databases to Aurora now. It is _much_ faster than MySQL/Percona Server. Even highly optimized MySQL installs with FusionIO cards struggled to keep up before we switched to Aurora.

Aurora is expensive, but it's a huge instant speedup and easily worth the cost for anyone with a production application that occasionally hits performance limitations on traditional MySQL.

That said, it is based on MySQL 5.6.10, so we are missing some features like online DDL from 5.6.17. Many bugs from 5.6.10 have been resolved upstream but are still present in Aurora. [0] It's also subject to the usual limitations of RDS (no SUPER, no access to the binary database files, no innobackupex).

[0] [https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/16/amazon-aurora- lookin...](https://www.percona.com/blog/2015/11/16/amazon-aurora-looking- deeper/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool, although I sure wish they had gone with Postgres. I can't live without the occasional JSONB anymore.

I know MySQL has made some half-hearted attempts to make headway on this front, but it has completely changed the way I model certain parts of my data.

<comment><USER4> I second this. I'd switch over from RDS to Aurora in a heartbeat if AWS built a postgres frontend for it.

<comment><USER5> Curious what is the key feature of Aurora on Postgres that you'd want?

<comment><USER6> PostGIS compatibility.

Unless you mean that the other way around, in which case I don't know what key features of Aurora I'm missing (besides price & performance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aurora being a closed-source fork of MySQL is a real problem in my opinion.

Look at all the comments here about new features and bug fixes introduced upstream but missing in 5.6.10 (online DDL, JSON, etc.).

We already have Oracle's MySQL, MariaDB, WebScaleSQL, MyRocks (Facebook's MySQL with RocksDB and DocStore), Percona Server for MySQL, and now Aurora. Each version has its own features and peculiarities. The ecosystem is too much scattered.

</comment><comment><USER8> For context: Faster indexing and numa awareness is in MySQL 5.7. The parallel read-ahead is a Facebook patch.

Aurora is based on MySQL 5.6.

<comment><USER9> So is Aurora just a MySQL storage engine (e.g., InnoDB), or a modified version of MySQL under the hood?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's api is based on mysql, doesn't share interals with it.

They had a deep dive into during the last re:invent.

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

<comment><USER8> Sure it does. You can see this from diagnostic commands (Innodb status, mutexes etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? Werner Vogels said they built a totally different logging and storage layer.

Also a good bit of video of Vogels talking about Aurora.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE- hU&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rPpCnFE- hU&feature=youtu.be&t=35m20s)

<comment><USER8> Logging and storage being new does not mean it does not share a lot of other internals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do you think that Aurora is a reason to start a new project with MySQL instead of Postgres? (Aurora starts at r3.large instances.)

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure. compose.com, among others, offers PostgreSQL hosting with auto- scaling. But I ignore if they can match Aurora with 64 TB databases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> MySQL compatible means that moving from MySQL to Aurora is transparent to the application, included all the MySQL (InnoDB?) peculiarities, which many regard as bugs?

This could be really important because some applications end up relying on MySQL oddities even with good willed developers.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any Equivalent for Postgre?

<comment><USER13> CitusDB is an option for scaling out PostgreSQL workloads, but it's not a direct equivalent to Aurora. That's both good and bad in different ways. E.g., it's good that CitusDB is not a fork of PostgreSQL as Aurora is a fork of MySQL. It's bad that CitusDB as pure software can't offer the same kind of high-performance, auto-replicated storage layer that Aurora does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember Ed Kemmet saying that NUMA optimizations are patent encumbered and presumably licensed. Probably part of the reason this is closed source.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this support column-oriented database designs?

<comment><USER16> It's still MySQL</comment></comment>


California Accidentally Posts 14,000 Social Security Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/12/13/california-social-security-numbers/

<comment><USER2> If I understood it correctly, a Social Security Number is some kind of number that identifies you, and if anyone else knows it, they can claim 100% they are you, right? And yet you need to give that number to all kinds of companies, hotels, and so on, and trust them?

This seems to be a trust based system, just like credit card numbers, which is also a concept used more in the US than elsewhere (elsewhere debit cards are used more and credit cards are more likely to have a PIN or other protections).

How comes it that in the US this kind of trust based systems with numbers are so popular compared to other parts of the world?

<comment><USER3> It helps solve the problem of authenticating someone based on something they know (e.g. for telephone password resets, banking questions, etc.) without a ton of complicated key pre-sharing. Even at the state level it may not be acceptable to have someone walk into a "local" office if it's 300 miles away.

Of course by now we (as in the general public and policymakers) know that this is stupid and that there needs to be a different way. But some proposed different ways (e.g. national ID w/ built-in PKCS crypto) are highly politically unfavored, and no one seems to have come up with and popularized a better way to do it that everyone will get on board with.

I personally figure that it will come down to government directing something or the other (perhaps adopting an interoperable standard which the states must implement) but Americans don't like solutions to come from government either.

<comment><USER4> I think he's speaking more to the way the system is setup in the US.

I believe every country has a system such as you describe. In my country, everyone has an ID number, much like a social security number. It is tied to everything, and is printed on everything, attached to every legal form I sign, and anyone can look my number up. If you call some place for service, it will be the first thing they ask for.

There is no-reason to keep this number a secret, and just by having this number, no-one can steal my identity. In fact I have never even heard of a single case of identity theft in the country, but that's not to say that it's not possible.

Anyway, I think aardwolf is commenting on the "trust" put in the fact that nobody else is going to use your number, whereas in other places, nobody is going to give you that same trust, which is why we use our identifiers more freely and rely on other methods to combat crimes like identity theft.

<comment><USER5> Conversely, in Australia there is the Tax File Number... that's about as close to a SSN as you'll get. The TFN is definitely personal. Unless you're dealing with finances in some way, it's illegal (I believe) to even ask for your TFN. Banks, employers and so on can ask for it (it makes processing your taxes easier) but I don't believe it's a requirement to even give it to _them_.

As far as I know, the only organisation that you're required to give it to is the tax office itself. Interestingly, by virtue of this number being so 'secretive' it really is usable as an identifier only to the tax office... which, I daresay, helps to reduce 'identity theft' based around that number.

<comment><USER6> That was how the SSAN was supposed to be used here -- only for tax-related things, such as banks and employers.

Unfortunately it didn't stay that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 3 level deep blogspam? Mashable takes content from ThreatPost[1] without adding anything, ThreadPost takes it from KCRA[2]. Can we at least link to TP or KCRA?

On the topic itself I really hope people get fired for this, although I doubt it since it's the government. Whoever posted it, their boss, and their boss' boss should all be disciplined. They should have an outside company audit their security and they should take immediate action to properly control who has access to SSNs, which should be almost no one.

1: [http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/14000-californians-risk- fo...](http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/14000-californians-risk-following- medi-cal-dhcs-breach-121212)

2: [http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sacramento/State- of...](http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sacramento/State-of-Calif- mistakenly-publishes-thousands-of-SSN- online/-/12969376/17723434/-/item/0/-/14jl2vwz/-/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Things like this scare me. Sure, these are SSNs and a lot of harm can be done by abusing them. But what if the _California's Medicaid health-assistance program, Medi-Cal_ had electronic medical records? It is so often proposed what kind of great budget savings such an instrument would bring, but the severe consequences for data leaks in this area are for individuals with extreme consequences.

</comment><comment><USER9> If only they posted 30 million of them, then maybe we'd get rid of the notion of using a SSN (which is basically a username) as a password.

</comment><comment><USER10> For many years you could find thousands of SSNs on court and bankruptcy filings. The courts finally figured out that they needed to redact this stuff. However, in a lot of places the wrong part of the SSN is redacted. The last four digits are the digits that matter. The first 5 numbers are relatively easy to figure out if you have birth date and birth state.

<comment><USER11> That's only true after the early 1980s. I was born in the early eighties, but my SSN was assigned several years later in a different state from which I was born.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't it take about 30 seconds to put a rule on an outbound firewall to block this?</comment>


Using Multiple Database Models in a Single Application - <AUTHOR> http://johnpwood.net/2009/09/29/using-multiple-database-models-in-a-single-application/

<comment><USER2> Aw, man - I thought I'd coined "polyglot persistence." Darn InfoQ article from July (referenced in this article)!

<comment><USER3> Ha, that's funny. I thought I coined the term as well until a Google search smashed my hopes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: WhatLane – A fun Q&A platform - <AUTHOR> https://whatlane.com <comment><AUTHOR> We just launched WhatLane in open beta and are looking for feedback regarding the web design, features, market demand, etc.

Do let us know (you can be harsh). Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Review Startup, jobmigo.com - Real Time Job Finder, Powered By Twitter - <AUTHOR>

Please review my friend's startup jobmigo.com<p>About jobmigo: JobMigo is an application created to help people find and sort jobs using twitter. So what does Twitter have to do with finding a job? Twitter has also become a place where users have begun to post listings for job openings. There are many ways in which this is done in the "Twitterverse". Some users are actually job portals, "tweeting" posts from their website for the benefit of anyone who is receiving the tweets. <comment><USER2> Couple of design/usability things I see:

\- Using a stock font included with OSX (Marker Felt) for the logo would not have been my first choice. And, marker Felt reminds me of comic-sans.

\- The logo is not matted properly, I can see a square box around it of a lighter shade of gray. Could be due to color shifts with your color profiles in Photoshop, or your original file is CMYK and is being converted to RGB when you save for web. The easy fix: change the CSS background-color of the header to #1b1c1e instead of #000.

\- From a IA perspective, what's more important to the end-user: 1) the twitter user that submitted the job or 2) the job title and description? I believe it to be the latter, but the jobs titles are lost amongst the bright pink links used on submitters name and pagination (two items relatively unimportant, but those elements shout at me).

\- The [1] next to each title is also confusing. Perhaps using Tooltips throughout the site would improve usability. I could also see that number being moved to the right of the Job Title.

\- I can't decide how I feel about the Twitter avatars as I can almost immediately tell that the site seems to be more focused on aggregating aggregators – at which point I tend to bounce onto other job sites that offer distinctively different jobs, than the same stuff I see over and over again.

\- The rotating headline at the top is wasted space as it stands. That is prime real-estate that's not being utilized effectively. I would switch it to a leaderboard banner that you can rotate JobMigo announcements through until you have paying advertisers.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback, this will help a lot to make the application more usable. We have added these issues to the forthcoming release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://jobmigo.com>

I think this is a good idea (had something similar floating around in my head) and it looks like you guys have executed really well.

\- There is a number (most always 1) next to each post title, it's not totally obvious what this is for...(especially if you're not a twitter pro)

\- It would be nice to view all tags without leaving the main page

Looking forward to watching your app as Twitter continues its crazy growth.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your feedback. The number next to each post title is the number of tweets referring to a particular job post. On recent tab, most of them are '1' as they are the first occurrence, however on popular tab (7 days/30 days), you can see the count as the number of tweets referring to that job, which implies popularity of the referred job post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It does look like a good idea. I myself am a bit confused by the "1"s next to the link. Looking through the site I did find a few dead links, and there wasn't a whole lot of content. However, I still think it has a lot of potential.

I think it's especially useful for some of our unemployed twitter friends who don't have the attention span for a traditional job search.

</comment><comment><USER6> A few comments: \- the tagging tool doesn't work well, tried Senior System Administrator, didn't find category, same for CTO \- I tried "CTO at companyx, Montreal, Canada" it showed "text too short" \- you might wanna also weigh in the number of followers to rank the tweets. I think a twitter bot will have less interesting tweets (auto-generated tweets), while a company's official twitter account will have much more followers, with legitimate twitter jobs \- you should also have a navigation menu, or search function to find jobs by city or country

also I'm ok with using the hashtag rtjobs, but #jobs is more obvious no??

<comment><USER3> The popularity of a job is decided by the number of followers or messages that refer to same url, which can be seen in 'Popular' tab. (24hrs/7days/30days) etc. We decided to use #rtjobs hashtag as its purpose is to share 'jobs to be filled' among the network. We wanted to differentiate the job tweets sent by bots from the job discussions done by actual twitter users. Thats the reason behind going for '#rtjobs' (re-tweet-jobs) instead of the popularly used tag '#jobs'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> nice idea! could you somehow let a user browse them by continent or even region?

btw, i am always annoyed if i meet the clearspring embedded flash thingy (due to the addthis button). dunno if that affects others as well...

alternate services include:

* <http://sharethis.com>

* <http://www.addtoany.com>

[http://linuxuser.at/blog/why-addthis-sucks-because-of- clears...](http://linuxuser.at/blog/why-addthis-sucks-because-of-clearspring)

<comment><USER3> Hi, we are toying around an idea of letting users browse jobs using Maps. This will remove the job search problem caused due to quantized geocoding. For ex: Dallas is tagged as "TX". A map search will get rid of such problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really like the way the skills and locations are extracted out below each tweet.

I see the team is based in the UK. Would be great to have you along to the next Twitter Developer Nest: <http://twitterdevelopernest.com> You could do a demo in the "Show & Tweet" session.

Have you seen: <http://www.twitterjobsearch.com> also from a UK company?

<comment><USER3> Yes, we are based in London and we will surely look forward for the next Twitter Developer Nest. We have seen twitterjobsearch.com, but jobmigo.com relies on entirely different principle. Unlike twitterjobsearch.com, jobmigo.com does not index all job related posts, instead, it relies on users to retweet only the interesting posts using #rtjobs hashtag. The aim is to separate out the 'most discussed' job posts from the overload of results given by other aggregator and search tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ok, it's a good idea

Design is simple and clean and the site seems to be working well.

However no one can predict if it will be useful or not. In my opinion, for Freelance Jobs, it may be successful, but for a company, i don't think it's good to hire from twitter, as you may get a lot of responses from different people.

Anyway, we shall give it a try, I tweeted it (<http://twitter.com/omarabid/status/1503823559>)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it me or does the search not work?

<comment><AUTHOR> it works for me when I select the autocomplete suggestions in the category and city fields

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hmm, interesting...

Twitter could become a classifieds portal if they exploit user-submitted ads sending tweets like @ads @jobs @auto @love etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no solution for direct democracy? - <AUTHOR> Hi there, i always asked my self, where there is no app, that solves democracy.
Why are we still voting every 4 years. Going back to first principles, we should ask ourselves :
Why do politicians exist? They existed(!) in ancient greece, because people didn't have time to inform themselves, right ? - We solved this with newspapers, 100 years ago. But, it would be too much paperwork to get the votes from millions of people. It wasn't scalable. - We solved that with smartphones, 5 years ago.
I would like to have votes like the one in switzerland, but with smartphones. Can you give me reasonable arguments, why this is not already done ? <comment><USER2> "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." ~ George Carlin

Do you really want people with 0 domain knowledge deciding whether to go to war? Or how to determine teachers' efficiency? Or how to set minimum wage? Or whether gay marriage is marriage? Or whether it is OK to execute people by a firing squad? Imagine 4chan running the government for the lulz.

Technology for this exists, or can exist. The problem is people. You really don't want an average person governing.

Not that an average politician is much better, but he/she can be. The idea with representative democracy is that you give people jobs and it is on them to execute. They get rewarded (re-elected) if they do well, and punished (not re-elected) if the do poorly. It's just that in the US where you have 90%+ incumbency rates in congress, there are no consequences for bad governing. It literally doesn't matter what you do, as long as you can raise money effectively, and that's what we are selecting for with the current system. Technology solutions should fix this problem, and the problem of PAC's, not let every single person with 0 knowledge weigh in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, speaking of domain knowledge : \- Why are politicians the ones that vote for/against net neutrality ? Do you really think, they have the domain knowledge ?

<comment><USER3> They're there because you (or people very like you) voted for them to represent you when the time comes to make new laws. If you don't like the one you've got, vote for another one.

<comment><USER4> This "if you don't like it, go elsewhere / vote otherwise" attitude really gets on my nerves.

It seems to presume the simplest possible Game-Theoretical scenario is fully representative of reality, and ignores all the factors that forced us to create representative governments in the first place or that are included in the common usage meaning of the word "politics".

To illustrate this, imagine an isolated SmallTown™ in northern Alaska, where relocating a family to anywhere else in the world costs upwards of 50 000$ (fictive figure). Mr. Daddy has a job and a family in this town. Suddenly, he's told that he now has to work 90h/week rather than 30h/week, and for whatever reason this is fully legal for his occupation and employment conditions. Now he has effectively no time to devote to his family. There are no other jobs available in this town where Mr Daddy has the skills for being hired that also pay well enough to support the family. "Not happy with the schedule change? No problem, you can just quit whenever!"... and have the family starve, as they're unable to relocate and there are no other options available.

The above scenario is an extreme where I've cranked up the scarcity level to 100%. However, even if you're a senior programmer in Bay, the problems and consequences and mathematics of quitting a job don't entirely go away. Depending on the situation and individual, the collaterals associated with quitting the job might be five times worse than accepting unfairly imposed conditions, where the situation could easily be resolved to everyone's benefit in a different configuration (think Nash equilibria vs Pareto optima).

And if you're not happy with this comment, well, obviously you should just go read another one. (heh)

<comment><USER3> Perfectly valid comment, but you've put it in the wrong place. My comment is about voting for one's representative, who then goes on to debate and shape future laws. This is key to representative democracy and has nothing to do with scarcity, mobility, or voting with one's feet/skill/labour.

If I don't like the policies of the guy I voted for last time, I won't vote for him next time. If lots of people in my region do the same thing, then he either has to shift policy or be replaced by someone who will. Are you suggesting I move if I don't like his policies? That is _not_ how democracy works, and isn't even close to what I'm suggesting. Nor am I suggesting (anywhere) that if I hold a minority position that I move, or change my vote.

I sincerely think you read something into my comment that I didn't say, and I'm trying really hard not to use the phrase "straw man" in regards to your comment, because I actually agree with you, but you're arguing against a point I didn't make.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I derailed substantially there. I think it was just another case of needing to vent about Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and your comment was the convenient outlet for this particular one.

In retrospect I'm quite happy you didn't take it the wrong way, or worse take the bait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Switzerland is not scalable.... ;-)

In fact, democracy is NOT about every single choice, it's about choosing a project for a society. And that's what politicians are for: to take decisions CONSISTENTLY to achieve a global goal. As a side effect: politicians may not be able to deliver on each promise, but it's not really a problem as long as they stay on the "track"

BTW. looking at Switzerland: do you really think that their last popular poll is such a good idea (about limiting collaboration with Europe) ? It has been voted but... it's not in their own interest (disclaimer: I'm french but not working in Switzerland)

</comment><comment><USER6> France had true democracy in the late 18th century. It became a popularity contest to send political enemies to the guillotine.

Democracy isn't the same thing as liberty and unfortunately people have started to believe freedom == democracy. When in reality democracy is just a way to organize decisions.

To put is succinctly if unnecessarily crass, but one could argue that gang rape is democracy in action.

<comment><USER7> > France had true democracy in the late 18th century. It became a popularity > contest to send political enemies to the guillotine.

That was not a "true" democracy. It was a mixture of anarchy (in that what government there was didn't have firm control of much of the country, or even of much of the forces nominally acting in its behalf) and oligarchical autocracy (in that what government _did_ have firm control was run essentially by fiat of the Committee of Public Safety.)

Insofar as it was "democracy" at all, it was _extremely_ indirect: electoral colleges were elected by the electorate (with ~11% turnout), who in turn elected delegates to the National Convention, which in turn appointed the Committee.

The US (either at the time or now) has much closer to "true democracy", by any reasonable definition, than Revolutionary France ever had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are lots of reasons but I will give four.

One of them is Arrow's Theorem, which proves there is no such thing as a "public interest" in which the preferences of a multiplicity of people can be aggregated. There has to be some coercion and some of people's preferences dismissed out of hand if you don't want to have cycles where people like Nader better than Gore and like Gore better than Bush but like Bush better than Nader.

Another one is that people are afraid of anarchism because they think it would be like the Watts Riots. The problem is not that the sheep will either riot or get lazy, but that with no government, the wolves will fight each other to make one.

On that note, we have referenda in many states in the US and looking at the record it's hard to believe these are a force for good in any way. Typically some rich guy is able to put forth something that sounds "populist", promotes it heavily, and then we have to live with the results.

For instance, California had a referendum called Proposition 13 in 1978 which is a major reason why there is an ongoing housing "crisis" because it created a regime where building housing causes fiscal damage to the enclosing town.

Finally, the political system is it's own entity which needs care and feeding, and politicians will attend to to that. One theory of politics is that politicians will do and say the minimum they can to get and to stay elected. If politicians gave everybody everything they want, the cost would be way too high, so disenfranchising voters is the key to survival. Right now the "gridlock" in DC is pro-systemic because it means when somebody asks a (Democrat|Republican) "What have you done for me lately?" they can say "Nothing because of the (Republicans|Democrats)"

<comment><USER7> > One of them is Arrow's Theorem, which proves there is no such thing as a > "public interest" in which the preferences of a multiplicity of people can > be aggregated.

Arrow's Theorem doesn't prove that, it proves that (for a particular formalization of on intuition of what is "perfect") there is no perfect way of taking rank-order-preference inputs from a group and producing a rank-order- preference output that is the aggregated preference.

That's not the same as proving the non-existence of a public interest, or even of one that can be assessed as a mathematical aggregate of some measure of individual interest. It just proves that any public interest that exists cannot (given the theorem's particular standard of perfection) be perfectly assessed with only the information provided in ranked-preference-order ballots (or, consequently, less information-rich mechanisms like choose-only-one- option ballots).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't have time to fully inform myself of every issue that the government must deal with.

Like hiring management we put someone in place that we trust to handle the minutiae and if they screw up we replace them with someone else.

That being said, I'd be all for a 'representative tracking app'. Basically, continuous polling of a constituency on issues with 'friends of the people' briefs from experts or interested parties. Then a comparison with how the representative actually responds to and reflects their constituency be it from direct comparison to voting records, to legislation introduced to advocacy on behalf of constituency. It'd be tricky because the people interested in responding to polls wouldn't necessarily reflect the will of the whole being a self selecting group and brigading problems but there could be some sort of meta analysis of respondents as well so people could know how seriously to take the results.

</comment><comment><USER10> You know there was couple of guys who carefully thought about it and even wrote a book about it. It's called "Cloud Democracy" and cover every single aspect include many of discussed here in comments. In short, it is possible and profitable, but should be developed with many considerations in mind. Excerpt from Amazon description:

"We live in the XXith century, but the democratic procedures employed today are mostly the same as centuries ago. The author's try to rethink the processes of decision-making within large groups of people, employing modern technologies. Meanwhile they show that "electronic democracy" isn't just "electronic voting + traditional democracy" but much more could changed in the way we cooperate and choose our representatives. "Cloud democracy" is a futuristic concept which could me make practical surprisingly fast."

</comment><comment><USER11> The real answer is, politicians and the elite want power for themselves.

You have to ask yourself, when a system is created where there's only 2 options, and where the same interests rule no matter whom you choose, do you really have a democracy?

Edit - apparently propaganda works. Both posts criticizing the US' democracy have been downvoted with no explanation. Still doesn't change the fact that what GWB started, Obama has continued, and the next incumbent, whether Dem or Republican, will continue... And the NSA will continue to grow, and whistle- blowers will still get imprisoned, and your rights will continue to be eroded away...

And the vote that comes up on top for me is one stating that the average US citizen is too dumb to be directly in charge (not entirely wrong, but also a very cynical attitude concerning democracy).

</comment><comment><USER12> To understand this, you need to understand what our current republic was designed to be a solution for. Read the Federalist papers, #11 is a good place to start. You will discover that the motivation for the establishment of a republic was actually to limit the will of the people and to protect the "opulent minority" ie, the wealthy. The system was explicitly designed, overtly, to preserve the power of the elite and making it extremely difficult for the majority to organize and get anything done. So, our government actually does exactly what is was designed to do, and it does it quite well. Direct Democracy is a solution to a different problem.

<comment><USER12> Further, years ago I designed a system that is a proxy based direct democracy system. We called it dynamic democracy. Someone in the bay actually quit his job and began organizing an ngo around it after I had a conversation with him. Basically, you have the right to vote on everything, but you can also proxy your vote to someone else on any issue, category of issues, etc. You can always override a proxied vote, but you can find someone you trust, who is an expert, and let them vote for you. This allows for you to save time, but some people who really wanted to put time and effort in would get more votes proxied to them. Of course, if they proxy their vote to someone else, it would influence all the votes tied to them. You could see how voting blocs would emerge organically.

<comment><USER13> I like this idea, and a Google search shows that it's still being thought about. This is one of those things that would be really interesting to try in a small slice of the real world to see what the people participating in it think of the system. I wonder how difficult it would be to get a group to sign on.

It also appears to me to be close to what the electoral college was intended to do: you do not vote directly for a representative; you vote for a member of the community whose opinion you trust to take the time to do the research on the candidates and pick the one who best represents the community's interest. That may have worked well when local communities were often more homogeneous than they are today, now it's just a weird artifact. With dynamic democracy, the ability to always override your proxy seems like it would mitigate the problem of accepting a representative "whole hog" and ensure that for the issues you find important you can always make your choice known.

What about the disadvantages of this kind of system? There are bound to be tradeoffs but given my cursory understanding (and enthusiasm for some kind of change) those are harder for me to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most people don't care enough to deeply understand complex policy issues, and shouldn't have to. Reading re-tweeted newspaper headlines isn't sufficient to make long term decisions that will affect millions of people. That's why we hire professionals that we trust to decide for us.

The problems with remote voting are authentication and coercion. How would we know that it's really you casting your vote, and that someone isn't physically forcing you to vote in a certain way?

Government and voting are going to change at some point in the future. But probably not in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> __How would we know that it 's really you casting your vote, and that someone isn't physically forcing you to vote in a certain way? __

We now have fingerprint sensors on the new phones. I can imagine, this will be a standard feature in 3-5 years. Back to your question: This could also happen with "regular" voting.

<comment><USER15> Fingerprint sensors that can't tell the difference between an image and a finger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is an excellent question but one where the answer might surprise you. From a technical perspective the purpose of 'slowing down' voting is a function of feedback control. Voting (whether it be on posts or on ballot issues) is a system where the system can change as a result of a vote and those changes can then cause more voting things. At the extreme end, where anyone could call a vote any time and your 'vote unit' would beep at you, give you the summary of the question and ask you to put your thumb on 'yay' or 'nay', not only would you find yourself sitting there with this thing going off constantly, the rules and regulations would change so quickly that nobody would be able to reliably follow them, even if they wanted to.

Under damped voting systems can oscillate out of control to self destruction just as effectively as circuits can.

But once you start down this path, what you'll really start to uncover is how the institutions of government are designed to work. So its a great place to start.

</comment><comment><USER7> > They existed(!) in ancient greece, because people didn't have time to inform > themselves, right ?

Greece (Athens) provided the model for direct democracy. The model for indirect, representative democracy is less exclusive, but the main ancient model is the Roman Republic.

> We solved this with newspapers, 100 years ago.

Newspapers are much older than 100 years old, and they don't solve the problem of lack of time. Arguably, they increase the information assymetry between the ruling class and the ruled class, since it is generally the former that controls the papers and selects what goes in them -- and what does not. This is somewhat offset when different factions of the ruling class disagree on what to present, in that information from both factions is likely to be presented (often in different outlets), but that increases rather than reduces the time and skill of the population needed to ferret out the _correct_ information.

> But, it would be too much paperwork to get the votes from millions of > people. It wasn't scalable. - We solved that with smartphones, 5 years ago.

We get votes from millions of people all the time. We solved this with distributed ballot counting and using basic arithmetic to aggregate the results. For the balloting methods we commonly use in the United States, ballot counting is trivially parallelizable and, therefore, easily scalable. Again, this was solved more than 100 years ago.

> I would like to have votes like the one in switzerland, but with > smartphones.

We have referenda in the United States at the state level. We don't at the federal level for social (Constitutional) rather than technical reasons. What is the point of adding smartphones into the mix, except to create additional economic stratification?

</comment><comment><USER17> Why? The masses are fickle, have poor situational awareness, do not have access to classified intelligence, are _unaccountable_ , and are easily manipulated by special interests.

For example, think of how a knee jerk "Should we nuke the Middle East?" vote would've gone immediately after 9/11\. Keep in mind, Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East or Arab.

</comment><comment><USER18> Direct democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the main reason is that there are plenty of people in the USA that don't actually trust democracy all that much, see the plentiful comments to that effect in this thread.

Other than that there is also the fact that, for a reasonable definition of "fair", it is impossible to make a fair voting mechanism. This is known as the Condorcet or Voting paradox.

It is also hard to make an electronic voting system that is trustworthy. You need to guarantee anonymity for the voter, verity that the voter is authorized to vote, ensure no voter can cast votes more than once, ensure that nobody can tamper with the totals in a manner that can't be detected and other similar concerns.

For example, ensuring anonymity of a vote along with confirming a user is authorized to vote, using the same device for both, while communicating over a connection being recorded by an adversary... that is probably quite tricky.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've thought about this a lot, even thinking of running in a district with the plan of "all my constituents will vote on my web site, and I will vote what the majority wants for each bill before me."

However, there are major problems that I have come to realize:

1\. Most people are absolutely stupid. Sorry.

2\. Even those that aren't idiots don't have the time to know the issues that cross the desks of their representatives.

3\. There's also the problem of very few people willing to give up anything for the public good. For example, nobody phoned into a recent NPR episode in favor of raising the gas tax, even though it's needed to keep the federal infrastructure maintenance fund from going bankrupt.

MAYBE this could work if you only get votes based on themes (Net Neutrality - For/Against, Free Trade - For/Against, etc). Then for high profile legislation you can get votes or something.

BUT, see 1.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are two problems with this approach.

One is the classic paradox of hiding something and revealing it at the same time: the vote must be secret to prevent social chilling effects, but it must also be strongly authenticated to preserve the integrity of the process. This is essentially the same problem that renders DRM ultimately infeasible.

The other problem -perhaps also a paradox- is that an abundance of information has not, in practice, resulted in a more informed populace. This is not to say that it has caused the populace to be less informed -that would be absurd- but it has not caused them to be particularly more informed either. 9/11 truthers and antivaxxers constitute some relatively non-controversial evidence for this claim; there are others that would invite non-productive flamewars if I listed them here.

</comment><comment><USER22> Governing by Referendum would be a nightmare. Think of thebstupidist person you know. Then imagine lots of people like that. Now imagine all those people making decisions about national defence or fiscal policy.

</comment><comment><USER23> An aspect of this no one is touching on is the mechanism for it. If it's done digitally, securing the process sufficiently would be nigh impossible. I had an instructor in an application security course who said "the moment we have online voting is the moment you can start referring to me as Mr President" and he's not wrong. Think of all the breaches you hear of involving credit cards, then think of how motivated people can get if the reward isn't money, but control of national policy.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this question arises from the misunderstanding of not realising that people are hypocritical about their preferences. The majority of people prefer for the power to stay in known hands, while enjoying a legitimating ritual that prevents the humiliations and loss of social status that would result from open subservience -- as was the case in less sophisticated models, like the feudal one. It's a win/win, but lying about your preferences is a fundamental ingredient.

</comment><comment><USER25> currently i think we need to ban lawyers and bankers from politics

with these lawyers in power - they make new laws every day and freedoms are actually shrinking

free speech zones, everything is taxed, marriage laws, drinking in public laws, its getting rediculous. poker and bitcoin are moving towards illegality (wtf? poker is actually my favorite hobby)

when did we decide we need someone to make laws every day and pay them with our taxes? this seems absurd to me. any insights? am i wrong here?

<comment><USER26> And then we need to ban all of those computer programmers from writing code because they keep creating buggy code that fails and is insecure.

Like it or not, lawyers are domain experts when it comes to law. They know both how laws are read/interpreted at the pointy end of the stick and understand the language in which laws are expressed better than you ever will.

Yes, you are wrong here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> We need to redirect our politicians from focussing on reelection to governing. And by governing I mean creating an easily understood and contemporary code. This would include repealing irrelevant laws, etc. The gathering of money for reelection should be placed into a common pool. It should be distributed equally among all candidates. This would improve the efficiency of our govt.

</comment><comment><USER28> What we call democracy is not true democracy. It's actually a very weak form of democracy, where we don't even ratify laws, let alone participate in their creation.

It's all about the politics of power. The elite in power don't want your input on legislation, they want to keep it from you. It's up to us to take back the power though.

For more information on this, read Noam Chomsky.

</comment><comment> anatoly-kern The main response for 'why' is because politicians want to control the power by pretending to have democracy.

</comment><comment><USER29> Voting has to be truly and completely private to not permit of corruption. Smartphones will not and cannot ever be so.

Watch this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY)

</comment><comment><USER30> Why isn't there one hammer than can build a house? Apps are just tools. You need people to swing them.

</comment><comment><USER31> See [http://liquidfeedback.org/](http://liquidfeedback.org/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Not everyone has smartphones.

<comment><AUTHOR> technology shouldn't be the problem. WhatsApp managed to support old phones as well. A technological solution would be : sending an sms to a specific government number.( free of course )

<comment><USER33> Not everyone has phones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again : technology shouldn't create problems. Phones should just be an easy alternative to paperwork. If "you" don't have a phone, you should still be able to vote with paper. Problem solved.

<comment><USER3> Not at all. The problem is now two problems, each with associated risks and caveats. Now we've got hanging chads AND repudiation of several sorts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You have two questions wrapped up in one. First, what would be the benefits / detriments of such a system? And second, why hasn't such a thing been implemented?

One large benefit could be increased participation and political efficiency. Right now you can vote every 2-4 years, write your congressman or local official, or start a protest or media campaign. These are high-cost actions with little perceived effectiveness on the part of most ordinary people, which explains why some people don't even bother to vote, much less participate in a petition, rally, or other political movement. But if expressing your political opinion was as easy as writing a restaurant review on Yelp, and as effective as Yelp in getting restaurants to respond, you can imagine how enthusiastically most people might participate. High participation would in turn provide government agents and politicians with a clearer indication of what voters want, and also increase their sense of accountability to those voters. General collective awareness about civic issues and trust in the system could increase as a result.

There's some potential detriments as well. First, nobody can be fully informed on all the issues, so how do you allow voters to make educated decisions or vote by proxy? Secondly, how can you protect the rights of minorities in a system where the will of the majority is easily determined? There are technical solutions to these problems, but the larger problem is that people would simply need to trust the system to work, which requires a working example.

Which leads to your second question. Why has there been no solution implemented as of yet?

Trust is one factor -- nobody has seen a working model for a national system (even though there are some municipal governments that are very progressive in this area), and so it's hard to garner widespread support for such a system.

By and far, however, the largest problem is that constitutionally the federal government has no support for such a system. Currently elected officials would have to muster the support for a bill or amendment and pass it into law. All currently elected officials won elections in the old fashioned way, and it's unlikely they would want to support a bill that would abolish the methods that allowed them to win. In other words, it's hard to change the status quo.

There's some ways to get around this. Some political entrepreneurs have tried to start "web 2.0" parties, where the party will vote according to deliberations on a website, but in general these have failed to win much popular support.

Personally, I think the most likely scenario is that either the Democrats or Republicans will find that adopting some software to allow more feedback from voters will improve their get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. This is a big area of investment for both parties, so it's not unrealistic to assume they might experiment with it in the next few election cycles. If one of the big parties were to adopt some software like this, the other would rapidly adopt it as well, and in that manner we might see a more online political process adopted rather quickly.</comment>


Performance Improvements in .NET 5 - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvements-in-net-5/ <comment><USER2> Every version bringing huge performance improvements!

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit quiet in here

<comment><USER4> Perhaps people still reading the rather long blog article?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, there's so much good stuff I had to take it in a few visits.</comment></comment></comment>


Dynamic DNS - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS <comment><USER2> You might find it interesting that namecheap can provide dynamic dns.</comment>


Show HN: Booltin - Create flyer, Promote it and Get feedback - <AUTHOR>

In this summer we hold a workshop in our university. We find out creating an attractive flyer, handing it out and putting it up on boards in proper locations are money and time consuming.
Although we decided to just promote it on our social networks, we could not get expected number of attendees. But at least we find out what an impressive and efficient advertisement needs.
So we start Booltin to solve this problem.
Booltin is an online service to create flyer easily, promote it quickly and get feedback efficiently.
Booltin launch page is here:
http://boolt.in
We really appreciate your feedback and suggestion. <comment><USER2> There are too many similar web sites such as smore.com, tackk.com and canva.com that already accomplish this idea perfectly.even they have responsive pages for mobile devices. what are you doing in addition? is there any new idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> we are working to make our service easy to use,which it is a art working. we have location base bulletin boards which users can put up their flyers on them so in this way their flyer could be seen by those peaple who are not in their connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> It is amazing. I have had exactly same problem but I could not came up with innovative idea such as you did. I am looking forward to hearing about it.

</comment><comment><USER2> It is also has got really stunning design. You guys really rock. keep going on.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was better if you put some screen shot of service.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting. When will it get ready?

<comment><AUTHOR> we are going to launch in three weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> and here is the [http://boolt.in](http://boolt.in)

</comment><comment><USER5> Simple solution, yet impressive</comment>


Ask HN: Button UI behaviour - <AUTHOR> I have observed a certain behaviour with on-screen buttons in a number of different environments (Android, PC, Browser) which perplexes me, and I'm hoping someone on here can explain it to me.  I'm not a UI developer, but I did try googling before asking with no luck.
The behaviour is that when clicking on a button quickly, the button visually registers the click (by depressing or changing shading) but the action intended to be initiated by the button does not occur.  This occurs intermittently - most of the time the button works normally.  I suspect that it is occurring because of a debouncing algorithm which checks that the button is depressed for longer than a certain amount of time before counting it as "pressed".  However, if that is the case, then why does the button appear to be depressed when it has not been clicked long enough to activate?
I'm sure I can't be the only person who has seen this phenomenon.  Can any of the UI experts on here shed any light? <comment><USER2> Check the css for `:active` as the button is being styled for `:active` which doesn't care if the Javascript functionality takes place or not. If you debounce the Javascript to prevent the action from firing multiple times that doesn't stop you from clicking the button and setting it to the `:active` state causing the styles to occur.

Codepen example: [https://codepen.io/anon/pen/bvGrKY](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/bvGrKY)

Click the button as much as you like - after 200 milliseconds you'll get a single alert but the `:active` style always applies on click.

</comment><comment> daffodil-11 I was puzzled by this recently and found it was due to slight mouse movement between the click and release. I can't remember the exact context but it was related to items that were drag-and-drop enabled. The press-to-select, move to drag, release-to-drop interaction was taking precedence over the press-release to click the button, even when the movement/drag was tiny, only a couple pixels.

I can't think of an instance where I would dragging-and-dropping a button, maybe it was an anchor element or something else clickable, but perhaps it's an avenue to investigate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you post a link or a video, some images? I'm not sure I'm understanding the behavior you are describing

<comment><AUTHOR> It is very intermittent, and I don't usually record all my clicks, but I will try to catch it somehow.</comment></comment>


Skype co-founder: Why Silicon Valley will never succeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/ahtih/why-silicon-valley-will-never-succeed

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI this was a tongue-in-cheek presentation done to Dave McClure and 500 Startups Geeks On A Plane Tallinn group yesterday as a fun way to compare the US views on many things tech and startups.

</comment><comment><USER2> A couple of good points but a rather popr presentation...

</comment><comment><USER3> How did this make it to the front page with only 4 points?</comment>