Show HN: Opinion on website before launch? What did you understand? - <AUTHOR> https://messengersellwebsite-staging.herokuapp.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm clearly not the target so I'm not going to comment on that.

However the loading times are horrendous on a slow dsl connection and I would never wait till the page has finished loading before going somewhere else.

Good luck with your app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey JM, I made the site lighter.

Would you mind refreshing it and telling me if it is still loading horrendously slow?

Thanks in advance! :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! :)</comment>


Official UK government attempt at censorship - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2012/10/06/official-uk-government-attempt-at-censorship/

<comment><USER2> So, from what I can readily tell, the UK government has an injunction to stop <http://badger-killers.co.uk/> from identifying people involved with the planned cull of badgers in the UK, the supposed intent of which is to prevent the spread of bovine TB. Presumably this is because animal rights activists in the UK have a track record of threatening violence / property damage against people involved in harming animals. Unfortunately this obviously also interferes with the normal and democratic ways in which the cull might be challenged.

FWIW, personally I say screw the the cull and the censorship attempt.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought that, in the U.S. at least, the use of a legal threat itself as extortion (as opposed the merits of a posited case, itself) was a serious "gray area" if not outright illegal in itself.

"We will take you to court to ruin you." (That being the primary objective, rather than the winning of whatever case is filed.) I imagine the UK has its own views on this, but wouldn't such an approach -- blatantly expressed -- receive serious scrutiny from any competent U.S. judge?</comment>


How the $6B trading app botched a launch so badly Congress got involved - <AUTHOR> https://www.ourmidland.com/technology/businessinsider/article/We-talked-to-10-Robinhood-insiders-about-how-the-14066692.php <comment><AUTHOR> Wanted to post the BI link but it's paywalled :(</comment>


User Interface Programming in the (Near) Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=335011

<comment><USER2> I have seen a wide variety of opinions on this subject already with people feeling strongly towards and against CoffeeScript. I have also read reasons why it is unnecessary to use this in conjunction with jQuery.

Myself I haven't taken much of an interest in using CoffeeScript but am an avid jQuery coder. This article really opened my perspective on CoffeeScript and I think I might have to run out and try something written in CoffeScript/jQuery.

I agree with the author and hope that we will see a programming environment for this soon.</comment>


Email Address Disclosures, Preliminary Report - <AUTHOR> https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address-disclosures-preliminary-report-june-11-2016/ <comment><USER2> Head of Let's Encrypt here. Our automated mail system had a bug that accidentally exposed about 1.9% of subscriber email addresses to the same 1.9% of recipients.

Our sincerest apologies for this mistake. We will be doing a thorough postmortem to determine exactly how this happened and how we can prevent something like this from happening again.

There is a preliminary report on the issue here:

[https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address- disclosure...](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address-disclosures- preliminary-report-june-11-2016/)

<comment><USER3> What do you need email for, anyway? Not giving you one makes it pretty easy not to leak it.

<comment><USER4> They send reminder emails when certificates are due to expire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The reason for this screw up was guessed by a Twitter user, and his theory was confirmed by Josh from Let's Encrypt [1].

The whole mess was caused by the Python `email` package, and specifically the behavior of the `MIMEMultipart` object [2]. When you reuse the same `MIMEMultipart` object for multiple emails, each destination address is appended. The same problem takes place when you use Python 3 [3].

[1]: [https://twitter.com/0xjosh/status/741487697059946497](https://twitter.com/0xjosh/status/741487697059946497)

[2]: [https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.mime.html#email.mime...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.mime.html#email.mime.multipart.MIMEMultipart)

[3]: [http://i.imgur.com/XwWlUXv.png](http://i.imgur.com/XwWlUXv.png)

<comment><USER6> I see that it's confrimed, but find it a bit odd that they had originally said "prepended between 0 and 7,618 other email addresses _to the body of the email_.", as this way it would be just a lot of "To" headers.

<comment><USER7> The design of MIMEMultipart causes duplicate key: values to be printed, rather than comma-separated addresses as specified in RFC 2822. [1]

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-3.6.3](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-3.6.3)

<comment><USER8> Multiple occurrences of the To, Cc, and Bcc fields are permitted (though obsolete).

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-4.5.3](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822#section-4.5.3)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since both users mentioned were the last in the list of addresses for the email they received, my money's on a trivial mistake like:

        getEmailBody(users[:i])

instead of

        getEmailBody(users[i])

I typically prefer a high level of polymorphism in my code/APIs (sensibly handling single inputs vs. arrays) but this is a great counter-example even if not the actual root cause. Every feature is also a liability. Double edged sword. Etc.

<comment><USER9> People on twitter suggest the reason could be a feature of a Python library: [https://twitter.com/TvdW/status/741481798014664704](https://twitter.com/TvdW/status/741481798014664704)

Assignment is interpreted as add-to-the-list operator.

<comment><USER5> It was confirmed by Josh, co-founder of Let's Encrypt: [https://twitter.com/0xjosh/status/741487697059946497](https://twitter.com/0xjosh/status/741487697059946497).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Preliminary report out from Let's Encrypt: [https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address- disclosure...](https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/email-address-disclosures- preliminary-report-june-11-2016/16867)

as far as I know, all emails starting with 0-9, A-Z and at least part of 'a' were exposed. I did not get one starting with 'g', so it's somewhere between 'a' and 'g' that it got stopped.

Edit: "7,618 out of approximately 383,000 emails" were sent out

<comment><USER11> Was just able to confirm, it's up to and including your email address. Mine starts with m so I see 3,761 email addresses. But for me, none lexicographically after my email address are exposed.

Edit: Just want to add that I've made a similar mistake before (with a smaller user base). So I understand how easily these bugs occur. Given all their progress in the last few years, I still believe that the privacy and security of such a large portion of the Web could not be in better hands. Props to the LE team for a quick, responsible response.

<comment><USER10> You mean M, not m. (it's in ASCII order). Also giving out the number of addresses you see will allow someone after yours to connect your username with your email address if you weren't aware.

<comment><USER11> Yes, sorry, "M". And if this comment[1] is true, then that number won't reveal much. Their mailer is probably distributed across several nodes.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11881953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11881953)

<comment><USER10> Multiple different images and a pastebin I saw posted on twitter showed the same starting set of emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sucks this happened but I don't really care. You guys are providing such an amazing and sorely need service I have no problem cutting you some slack. I hope others will too. Of course those working for companies who's lunch you're eating will likely run with this as far as they can.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that since the list of addresses was sequentially prepended to (if I understand the wording of the notice correctly), anyone who anonymously shares the list will incriminate themselves ,though to a smaller and smaller pool of peer customers.

<comment><USER14> A simple solution to this would be to chop off an arbitrary number of addresses prior to disclosure. The first person can leak any number of emails, and the last can only leak one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminded me exactly of Python's mutable default arguments:

[http://docs.quantifiedcode.com/python-anti- patterns/correctn...](http://docs.quantifiedcode.com/python-anti- patterns/correctness/mutable_default_value_as_argument.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like the popular "append e-mail address to e-mail text with each iteration of the loop while keeping the previous ones".

</comment><comment><USER11> To clarify: the email addresses are in the body of the message, not the To field.

</comment><comment><USER17> The Hyatt hotel in Switzerland did a similar thing a few weeks ago. They sent a mail shot to everyone using the CC function not BCC. I complained and their response was that they'd recalled the mail so 'that was that'. Of course a recall means nothing to the hordes of gmail addresses,etc. that the mail shot was sent to. It's a common problem and a big incentive to use throw away addresses.

<comment><USER18> The new head of the IIA (Irish Internet Association) did a cc on the entire membership just a few days ago announcing her arrival. Felt pretty sorry for her. She actually did the bcc correctly the first time but forgot the attachment then correcting that she did a cc.

A comedy of errors....

<comment><USER19> I once asked to be removed from a list and suggested they use CC instead of BCC. I accidentally did so by way of Reply-All. Boy did I feel stupid. For days. While everyone kept replying to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. Slightly embarrassing. Not a huge deal. Handled well.

</comment><comment><USER21> For the curious this was the content of the email. Pretty generic.

"Dear Let's Encrypt Subscriber,

We're writing to let you know that we are updating the Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement, effective June 30, 2016. You can find the updated agreement (v1.1) as well as the current agreement (v1.0.1) in the "Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement" section of the following page:

[https://letsencrypt.org/repository/](https://letsencrypt.org/repository/)

Thank you for helping to secure the Web by using Let's Encrypt"

</comment><comment><USER22> Planned email blast accidentally cc'd other recipients, allowing users to see each other's email addresses. They caught it after <8,000 emails went out and are fixing the problem.

<comment><USER23> It wasn't a CC, if it was then there wouldn't have been a way to stop after only some had gone out, because that's not how CC works.

<comment><USER24> Isn't the CC header essentially an instruction for the local MTA? So their local MTA might could have been relatively slowly working through the CC list (contacting each recipient mail server in turn). I'm not saying this is what actually happened.

<comment><USER25> No, MTAs don't look at the To or Cc headers at all. The addresses to deliver to are listed in the SMTP rcpt to command. The MUA can provide a completely different list to what's in the headers.

<comment><USER24> Ok, good if pedantic response. I think the substance of my point stands: MTAs can take some time to work through the CC list (which, as you say, is passed to them with the "rcpt to" command by a well-behaved MUA)

In other words, delivering a message to copious CC: recipients is not an uninterruptable operation even after the MUA has finished its job. They might have had to/been able to stop the local MTA to interrupt the rogue emails.

<comment><USER25> Sorry, to clarify why this is not just pedantic, the MUA is likely to split up a long list of recipients rather than try to send an arbitrarily long list in one rcpt to command and potentially fail after a very long time processing and sending data. The fact that they don't have to be the same means that the list in the message can be arbitrarily long regardless of how the MUA batches it for the MTA.

In that event, it is interruptible.

Also, the MTA will batch its own outgoing sends to individual servers (giving them either just one rcpt to or all the recipients whose MX map to that server) and it could be interruptible there as well.

The point is that when sending to many many delivery addresses, things get batched at various stages and become more interruptible than if your CC was the master list of how a message were routed.

<comment><USER25> Which, to clarify a bit further, is agreement with your conclusion but not how you got there, so maybe that's what you meant by pedantic. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think it's positive that they own up to it and actually apologize.

One would also think that most subscribers of this newsletter has a positive attitude towards the general concepts of privacy and security, so I'm also positive in thinking that a list of these disclosed addresses will never see the day of light (hoping I'm not too naive).

</comment><comment><USER27> I received one of these emails (most likely because my address begins with 73 and the emails are sorted alphanumerically). It looks like this: [http://pastebin.com/vpPU5sLj](http://pastebin.com/vpPU5sLj)

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if people whose email addresses start with the letter 'a' also get more spam.

</comment><comment><USER29> A reminder: If you got a copy of this e-mail (as I did), please don't repost it -- or if you do, don't include the e-mail addresses.

</comment><comment><USER30> Curious to see the reply-all thread that ensues.

<comment><USER31> It probably won't be very exciting considering the emails existed only in the Body of the email. The emails themselves were only addressed to individuals. You can see this in the linked screenshot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not of those that did not specify any, I would imagine; you can use the ACME service without providing any email address at all.

</comment><comment><USER33> Good to know, but really I don't care if they send my email address to every other registrant. I run a public web server, I already receive junk email that must be filtered, so I see no problems. It has zero impact on the free certificate service they provide.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's disappointing to see this level of incompetence from a group responsible for such great leaps in web security. Let's Encrypt should take appropriate steps to ensure this never happens again lest they erode users' trust any further.

<comment><USER35> Things like this happens all the time. Give them a break. They already did what needed to be done. It's a bad bug yes, but lots of people here could have done it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does this suggest that the first person got sent 7,618 e-mails?

</comment><comment><USER37> Note to self: use a new email account when using this service.

<comment><USER38> I try to do this for every service I give an email address to.

<comment><USER39> gmail still drops the ball, because you have to give your realaddress+marker rather than being able to request a marker.

The correct behavior is to be able to request a marker when signed into any email account, and on my side set the tag that it gets tagged with in that inbox as a result. The link between marker and inbox should remain secret.

<comment><USER40> I pay for a FastMail account which gives me up to 500 aliases. These are then sucked down in to my Gmail account.

<comment><USER41> Out of curiosity, why do you do this? FastMail has an amazing webmail interface and Android app. I'd never go back to Gmail.

<comment><USER40> The original thinking was to make it harder for casual snoopers. If FastMail gets compromised, then they'd need to be compromised over time and someone would need to review a lot of my email with a shelf-life of one-hour to understand who I was - I use auto-generated credentials, paid via Bitcoin, and login once a year via VPN to generate more addresses.

If Gmail gets compromised, you'd need to be looking for a bunch of Fastmail accounts in To: addresses to link my primary email with those emails.

If you wanted to track me down from an email address, you'd need a warrant in Australia (for FastMail), and the US (to find the account using those FastMail credentials), so I'd need to have actually done something wrong (which I haven't), and you'd need to convince judges in two jurisdictions of that. As I said, the threat model is against casual snoopers, rather than a determined state actor with proof of wrong-doing, as I don't think I'm even slightly interesting and I don't think I've done anything that would make me interesting.

As it turns out, you could probably just read enough of my FastMail email as it came in (before it gets deleted by Gmail) to figure out who I am, so this is imperfect.

<comment><USER41> It'd be a lot simpler to rent a VPS and setup your own mail server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hm, I didn't get anything.

Did you sign up in the earlier or later stages?

<comment><USER43> It looks like it's sending them alphabetically. I wonder at what point in the alphabet someone hit the kill switch.

<comment><USER10> 0-9, A-Z were sent out and part of 'a'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Security is not just a product.

</comment><comment><USER45> What I'm asking me myself everytime I see a post about data leak, could you sue a company for the leak?

<comment><USER46> You can sue almost anyone for almost anything. Could you win? IANAL, but I think you'd have to prove damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Note to self: keep using HTTP, and provide HTTPS for important website content (like shop payment) and use a SSL/TLS Cert that lasts 1 year.

<comment><USER48> > keep using HTTP, and provide HTTPS for important website content (like shop > payment)

What if someone MITM's your site, injects some code so that when the user clicks on the checkout link/button they get sent to a malicious site?

<comment><USER47> Have you asked Amazon the same question? It works fine for them since 1994.

<comment><USER49> Amazon has deployed HTTPS across all their sites a couple of weeks ago.

<comment><USER47> Yes, just last week. And parts of site were down too for some hours. Is MITM something new? No. What is the point? Amazon worked fine since 1994/95\. The whole HTTPS-only movement looks very orchestrated.

<comment><USER48> HTTPS everywhere is a good thing, and if you don't understand why that's fine, I don't have the time to explain to you why you are wrong, but you are. Good luck deploying Internet connected services in the past.

<comment><USER47> The difference is I understand the Pro and Cons. That's why HTTP and HTTPS is often better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Directly below the apology for leaking emails addresses, I get this message prominently displayed:

> _" Hey there! Looks like you're enjoying the discussion, but you're not > signed up for an account._

> _When you create an account, we remember exactly what you 've read, so you > always come right back where you left off. You also get notifications, here > and via email, whenever new posts are made. And you can like posts to share > the love."_

> _[Sign up] [Remind me tomorrow]_

No thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER51> The jaded, bitter part of me hopes this will be another nail in the coffin for XaaS and the recent trend of centralizing everything onto Web services.

The rest of me which is more jaded and bitter knows that it won't.

<comment><USER52> What would your ideal online world be?</comment></comment>


Analysts on Apache Quitting JCP: 'Oracle Is the Loser' - <AUTHOR> http://adtmag.com/articles/2010/12/15/apache-quits-jcp.aspx

<comment><USER2> Nice read.

So what's next? Apache will push a not-patent-encumbered (does that exist? harmony?) as the next defacto standard of java. Oracle gets to hang on to its "Java" (a wonderful name for selling to Enterprise). Google goes with the Apache's standard and it's Dravik fork (it provides APIs, toolkits and a mobile operating system leaning on what soon might be know ar "formerly- java").

From the article:

"It may be covered by a GPL license, but the field of use restrictions and Oracle's unwillingness to give Apache a TCK that grants patent protection creates a situation where it's practically impossible to fork Java or create an alternative VM. If you can't fork it, it's not open from and OSI perspective."

GPLv3 would have enough clauses to have prevented this from happeneing... ...but so fa only in theory... right?

Interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: How to start a startup in Amsterdam? - <AUTHOR> I have been approached for a startup. The idea isn't mine, but I think it's good. It solves a problem that some big organizations with money have, and it approaches the solution from the perspective of their users. I like it and want to work on it. There are multiple ways we could get money for this, and he's already working on some of them. He's already put a lot of work into this on his own.
The Ideas Guy pulled my CV from LinkedIn and (for whatever reason) decided that I was the perfect partner with whom to start a startup. We didn't know each other before, but he seems nice and reliable, in his 50s (I'm in my 40s). He also wants to get someone for finance/back office and then found the company with the three of us. I'm not sure we need a dedicated finance/back office person at the start, but what do I know?
The past couple of years, I worked as a freelancer. This feels like a logical next step. I have a family, but my wife has a good job, and I saved up enough money that I can afford a pay cut. Hopefully the equity will make up for it, but I think I can also afford the risk.
So what do I need to pay attention to? How do I determine what a reasonable amount of equity is? What legalities do we need to get arranged? Should I get my own lawyer? How do I determine whether I'm good enough and whether he's good enough? How do I select a software team? How do I plan this? (My past couple of jobs were with big, slow moving organizations. A startup needs to move a lot faster than that, I assume.) Can 40- and 50-somethings run a startup and still be in bed in time and take the kids to school? How do I make sure I pick the right technology stack? (I'm leaning towards Angular+Scala/Finatra, though I have no Finatra and little Scala experience yet. Is that wise?) Are there any Dutch subsidies or VCs we should know about?
What other things am I missing? <comment><USER2> That is a lot of questions. \- Could you find that one or two bottleneck questions that could solve your problem?

Secondly i am from Europe and Amsterdam was properly the only place in Europe i wanted to start one. It.s such a fantastic and crazy place. Amsterdam has momentum, craziness, but filling you with joy every day..

If you believe in the mission take the jump!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm at a very early stage. I'm having my second meeting with the Ideas Guy today. I don't have any bottlenecks yet, but I want to be prepared when we get there.

Basically, I want to have the biggest chance that we succeed, and I don't want to be screwed out of my share if we do succeed. I think the Ideas Guy is reliable, but I barely know him, and I'd rather be safe than sorry. Especially if we get more people on board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Numbers game, uh? I would be aware: tinderisation of business relationships is as bad as realising after a couple of weeks that the marriage is not going to work. Have agreements and timeplan in writing and arrange a plan B to cover your a*se.

<comment><AUTHOR> A timeplan in writing? I have no idea how much time this is going to take. He's rather optimistic about it, in my opinion. It's really something we need to try in order to figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lot's of random advice from the internet. None particularly unique to Amsterdam.

 _So what do I need to pay attention to?_

1\. Product Execution. Putting something in front of potential customers and getting feedback and iterating repeatedly and rapidly.

2\. Business Execution. Proven legal documents including vesting schedules.

 _How do I determine what a reasonable amount of equity is?_

IMO, equity should be evenly split between cofounders. Google Joel Spolsky's essay. If someone puts up cash, treat it as a loan to the company not for equity.

 _What legalities do we need to get arranged?_

Proven articles of incorporation.

 _Should I get my own lawyer?_

Avoid people you don't trust. The only lawyering should be to create the corporate entity. If everyone is lawyering up and hard ball negotiating at the outset, no. Just walk away. It won't get better. Even equity avoids lawyering up.

 _How do I determine whether I 'm good enough and whether he's good enough?_

Track record. I'd look long and hard at the specifics of what an "idea person" really brings. Particularly experience with software products and a real world understanding of development processes. Cold calling developers off of Linkedin is not a good sign. Wanting a third person to perform back office operations for two people is not a good sign. Not being confident to learn and manage finance is not a good sign.

 _How do I select a software team?_

Until there is proven product-market fit, you don't. Then slowly and carefully from your rollodex and those of the people in it.

 _How do I plan this? (My past couple of jobs were with big, slow moving organizations. A startup needs to move a lot faster than that, I assume.)_

If it's really a startup, i.e. a company organized and focused on growth and providing returns to investors via increases to the value of equity rather than cash flows, it's not something that gets planned beyond grabbing the tiger tail and hanging on.

 _Can 40- and 50-somethings run a startup and still be in bed in time and take the kids to school?_

Maybe. I suspect it depends on luck and the individuals and their situations. But if those things are core values, then don't give up on them.

 _How do I make sure I pick the right technology stack?_

By focusing on it's immediate suitability for product execution as mentioned above. If the startup is successful, the technology will change do to scale and evolution of the product and everything will have to be rewritten and rearchitected.

 _I 'm leaning towards Angular+Scala/Finatra, though I have no Finatra and little Scala experience yet. Is that wise?)_

Absolutely not.

 _Are there any Dutch subsidies or VCs we should know about?_

The idea person should already have this on their plate and be working on it.

 _What other things am I missing?_

My gut is that there are elements of "getting a freelancer to build it for free" in the proposal. How much of that exists can be approximated by the degree of difficulty you would have building the product from right now without the "idea guy" and "back office guy" being involved.

I just don't see what the "idea guy" is going to be doing to create value while you're slinging code and the other person is handling the money and emptying out the trash cans.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Business Execution. Proven legal documents including vesting schedules.

That's the kind of thing I know almost nothing about. Is there an easy intro for this? I suppose this is something that can vary a lot per country.

> equity should be evenly split between cofounders.

Is that fair in this particular case? I get the impression he's been working on this idea for a couple of months already. He's been talking to a lot of people, including some very relevant potential business partners. I think he is already incorporated and/or has a holding company.

> The only lawyering should be to create the corporate entity. If everyone is > lawyering up and hard ball negotiating at the outset, no. Just walk away.

Sounds like excellent advice.

> I'd look long and hard at the specifics of what an "idea person" really > brings.

He's already been building a network of contacts, gathering relevant datasets, and refining his ideas.

> Cold calling developers off of Linkedin is not a good sign.

I've addressed this with him. Apparently there are things in my CV that gave him the impression I'd be perfect for this. And in some ways I think he's correct, though there are also some aspects where I think he's a bit naive or optimistic about what it involves in software development. Maybe our one on one talks have convinced him that his impression was correct, but I suppose it's also possible he has talks like this with a lot of people. I don't think he's scamming this (he's put real work into this, has collected information on what datasets he'd need and how much they cost, and his idea is good, so why scam?), but I suppose it's important to be sure.

> Wanting a third person to perform back office operations for two people is > not a good sign.

Maybe he's used to that from larger organizations. I don't quite see the need for someone like that as a co-founder (though I'm not sure I'm even a co- founder, considering he's apparently already incorporated), but he seems to have found someone who has contacts with at least one successful startup, and that could be useful experience if true.

> Until there is proven product-market fit, you don't.

How do you prove product-market fit? Without a functional product, you can't test the market. I think the key element here is whether we can get subsidized by the stakeholders. I think it should be possible to get a basic proof of concept together on my own. With that, we could pitch to those stakeholders. But to get beyond a proof of concept, I really need a dev team. There's way too much work in this for a single developer.

> If it's really a startup, i.e. a company organized and focused on growth and > providing returns to investors via increases to the value of equity rather > than cash flows, it's not something that gets planned beyond grabbing the > tiger tail and hanging on.

Is that the definition of a startup? I thought it was simply a new company that starts small. I see plenty of opportunity for this to grow into a company with its own cash flow. Just grabbing a tail and hanging on seems like a very questionable plan.

> The idea person should already have this on their plate and be working on > it.

He is, but he doesn't know everything. Though he says there are organizations that can help with this, so I guess that's a better place to look.

> My gut is that there are elements of "getting a freelancer to build it for > free" in the proposal.

He's very explicit about wanting to pay normal salaries, with part of it replaced by equity. The downside of that is that it immediately puts a (arbitrary) value on the equity.

> I just don't see what the "idea guy" is going to be doing to create value > while you're slinging code and the other person is handling the money and > emptying out the trash cans.

Contacts, get more money (subsidies, investors) and work with the team to refine the features.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the additional information. My take:

\+ The idea person is trying to convince people to work on the cheap. The difference between a freelancer/contractor/consultant and an entrepreneur is that freelancer/contractor/consultants make money by doing the work. Entrepreneurs make money by getting other people to do the work. The more work an entrepreneur gets for less money the more money the entrepreneur makes. The freelancer makes money in exactly the opposite way.

\+ I'm using "startup" in the narrow technical sense that someone in Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem might. Out in the rest of the world, the success of companies founded on that model has led to "startup" entering the common lexicon as a synonym for "a new business" and people will apply "startup" to restaurants and dry goods stores and an office of consultants billing time and materials.

There is some shared structure between startups and normal businesses. One of the things that isn't shared is the risk reward profile. A restaurant will never have exponential growth in users or revenues. It will never have nominal unit costs approaching zero.

\+ One of the features of a startup in the technical sense is a focus on the growth in the value of equity creates a better alignment of interests among investors and employee shareholders [in a startup in the technical sense, founders are employees].

In the end and at the start, "paying normal salaries with part of it replaced by equity" is not paying normal salaries. In a business structured to provide regular cashflows to owners and investors, the controlling interests can [and often do] reduce profits via paying themselves excellent salaries, leasing or renting intellectual, real or personal property to the business, employing family members, etc. All are legitimate business expenses and all are normal business practices for businesses optimized around dividends and profits.

Please don't misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with a cash-dividend oriented model, or with going to work for someone else.

But I want to be clear that this does not look something clearly intended or structured as the sort of startup one reads about on Hacker News. That means that the sort of outcomes one reads about are less likely. It also means that the class of investors the business will have access to will not have the sort of objectives and operational values which are more common among VC's and the terms upon which cash can be raised are likely to be far more heavy handed.

My advice:

Have expectations aligned with what the company and its organization and control structure are likely to be rather than with what tends to be described on the Hacker News front page.

Focus on understanding what the "ideas guy" expects for the organization and control of the company.

Don't go into business with people you don't understand and trust 100%.

Programmers have unlimited access to projects someone wants built for free or at a discount.

Programmers have a nearly unlimited access to people who have ideas that they will let you build.

I like this essay: [https://sivers.org/multiply](https://sivers.org/multiply)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your take. I don't think he's looking to convince people to work on the cheap, though. Of course he doesn't want to give money away, but he's clear he wants to pay both money and equity (I think he was talking options; I have no idea what's a good idea or what's reasonable).

I get your point though that if everybody shares equally in the company, everybody has their incentives aligned, and it doesn't matter much how you balance money versus equity value, because everybody is in the same boat.

On whether this counts as startup or not: it's not a restaurant. It's something that could scale globally and to billions of users. I think it adds the most value to users in western Europe, and particularly cities like Amsterdam, but it adds some value to everybody everywhere. It could get really big, but we're happy with just being big in a couple of western European countries.

What it isn't is the kind of startup that has no business model beyond investors and getting bought by Facebook or Google. This could work as an independent company. And if we can get the right subsidies, this could even work without early investors dilluting our equity. He's also looking at crowdfunding, because you can also build a community around this. I have my doubts about whether that's a good idea (at least at an early stage), and he seems to be coming around to my line of reasoning.

> One of the features of a startup in the technical sense is a focus on the > growth in the value of equity creates a better alignment of interests among > investors and employee shareholders [in a startup in the technical sense, > founders are employees].

So how does that work? Do all employees get a similar amount of salary+equity? It's possible he's doing exactly the thing you say, and I just don't understand. He did propose starting at a valuation of € 1000, at something like 100,000 shares of €0.10, which I didn't understand (my gut reaction would be that I'd like to buy this company for that amount, because he's already invested more into it than that), but maybe the point is that it grows as everybody, including him, gets the same salary+equity. (Though I still wonder if that's fair to him, considering how much time and money he's already put into this.)

I think this is easily the point I understand the least about.

I don't see this as building someone else's idea for free. The worst that could happen is that I might slightly less money working on someone that's interesting and exciting, than I would working on something that's boring but safe. And that's assuming the project fails.

I honestly have no idea what the salary would be. I personally feel like a €100.000+ salary would be too much for a startup looking for its initial funding, but on the other hand, my salary can't be that much lower than that either; it's going to be in that order of magnitude anyway, so maybe I should stop worrying that my salary might be a problem for a starting company.

The reasons I would want to do this with him are: * It's a good idea and I think it will work * He put a lot of effort into it already and has contact with relevant stakeholders * I think he's honest * It's an interesting thing to work on, and it will be an educational experience even if it does ultimately fail

<comment><USER4> HN user jacqesm [Jacques Mattheij] might be worth chatting with:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm)

<comment><USER5> His blog: [http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/](http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/)

In case it isn't obvious to the OP, the suggestion here is based (in part) on the fact that Jacques Mattheij is also Dutch.

<comment><USER4> That. And smart and experienced and well intentioned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice! I'll contact him.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing the new compose in Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/introducing-new-compose-in-gmail.html <comment><USER3> I hate being the guy who sidetracks a thread off the bat by complaining about something unrelated, but...

Whatever blogspot theme Google uses for this blog is just god awful (oh, I see, this is it: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed- gm...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/as-you-may-have-noticed-gmail-blog- has.html)), and I swear it gets worse every time I view a post there.

To wit:

When I load the page I see the orange "loading" gears. Then that sliiiiides up to reveal the content. Really? Can they really not innovate here? This is a company that spends massive amounts of resources to get their homepage to load as quickly as possible. Heck, they even penalize companies in their index with slow loading times. And yet they purposefully add loading animations and transitions which add _at least_ a second to page load, and probably more as far as time it takes me to engage in the content.

Also, every time I reload the page I see something different. Sometimes there is text in the black menu bar. Sometimes there is not. Sometimes there is an "extra" screen that slides up after the orange loading gears, sometimes not. Sometimes the sidebar navigation is there, sometimes not. Try refresh a few times yourself and you'll see.

Also, I love the five-second delay for the document URL update when you navigate via the sidebar.

All of these fancy, look-we're-using-ajax, gee-whiz-its-a-single-page-app features -- just for a simple blog post. Talk about complicating a simple problem!

Again, apologies for the rant but I couldn't even concentrate on what the blog post was saying because I was so distracted by this garbage.

<comment><USER4> Ugh, why would anyone up-vote this comment? Some how this is the top comment, even though it doesn't address the content of the article. This happens all the time on HN and I find it very annoying.

It's not just that I don't want to scroll past this comment. These meta- comments may seem harmless, but when this is the top comment, it stifles the entire discussion about the article. Instead of people discussing the merits of the new GMail UI, there is an endless chain of replies burying all the topical comments.

I've said it before - I'd like to see a community guideline advising people not to make comments like this. These comments end up being easy ways to score points, entertaining for the people involved in the criticism, but harmful for the topical discussion. If it's a "Show HN" post about a hacker's new project, it seems topical to criticize the technology, but when it's a blog post, it seems so lame to criticize the blog software.

This kind of complaint belongs in its own thread - it should be a blogpost or something. The comment doesn't even apply to me - the page works perfectly and crisply for me.

<comment><USER5> He's getting upvoted because it had to be said... finally.

<comment><USER6> Yeah! After all, it isn't like this comes up every (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4070192>) single (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767025>) time (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4196833>) a official Google blogpost is submitted or even is brought up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Saving a draft, opening the old email, and then reopening your draft wastes valuable minutes. The new compose pops up in a window, just like chats (only larger)._

Minutes? I do sometimes wonder where the day goes...

Alternatively, Shift-click on compose (or press capital C to with keyboard shortcuts on), and you'll get an actual window that you can move and resize. With the chat mini-windows I frequently wish that I could adjust them, and often accidentally collapse them by clicking in what looks like a title bar.

Or if you already have a message open, just shift-click on Inbox to open a new window. Or not --- Google in their wisdom has disabled that to prevent confusing some poor soul with a broken shift key, praise be their servers. But C-n for a new window, ma-return, /search, C-w isn't that bad.

I like the idea of minimizing the address area, but don't understand the advantages of the new approach. Is it primarily for tablet compatibility? Or is the concept of windows still considered unteachable? And why are they decreasing support for traditional click modifiers?

<comment><USER8> I completely agree. We all have some sort of window manager that deals with handling multiple windows in a consistent way. We don't need every website reinventing window management in their own half-assed manner, that is utterly inconsistent with other sites and other applications.

<comment><USER9> I don't think the average user can really deal with multiple windows efficiently.

<comment><USER10> I hate hate HATE new windows. It reminds me of IE or MS outlook manage this particular problem. I like this idea of a smaller chat like window, it's really blurring the line between chat and email once again. (Like google did when they started chaining emails together. Remember when that wasn't even a thing! I do, cuz I was amazed when google started doing it.) I think google really gets me when it comes to how I like to communicate via email..

<comment><USER11> If I'm reading the wikipedia article correctly, Mutt was threading email in 1995.

<comment><USER10> haha touche. Granted... Mutt was terminal based....

<comment><USER8> > Mutt was terminal based

And it still is, as many satisfied users will tell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can see the merits of this, but I'm curious about how it fits into a mobile strategy.

My big complaint about email, especially gmail, is that it seems to insist on keeping too many elements from desktop to mobile. My mobile email needs are much more like my SMS needs, yet the UX for mobile Gmail (for example) largely resembles the desktop client.

I know that's tangential, but it's what's on my mind regarding Gmail right now.

<comment><USER13> The thing is, who uses mobile GMail? Almost everyone I know uses a native client (Android or iOS). The mobile version of Gmail is definitely a second- class citizen, but I'm glad they're not letting it hold back development of awesome features like this.

<comment><USER12> I dislike all native mail clients even more than I dislike the iOS gmail app, which is largely a hybrid web app if I'm not mistaken.

I use the iOS gmail app, but what I really want is this:

An app that present emails to me like iOS messages, but with some design changes to fit long content.

This would allow for better context (messages are individualized and chronological) and faster, one touch responding while I'm on the go. Responding to emails on a phone is much slow and significantly more challenging than responding to a text, and I see no reason for that.

<comment><USER13> I hate to be that guy, but buy an Android. Google is working to expose a lot of ways to reply quickly to texts and email, and I don't think Apple really cares about being ahead of the curve in this area. For example, Jelly Bean adds the ability to open a modal dialog and reply to a text message without switching applications. Presumably, this feature will come to GMail shortly, and if not, someone can use the API to make an email client where it works.

Also, the current Android GMail app sounds more or less like what you're asking for, with the messages neing collapsable.

<comment><USER12> I think I'll just build what I want myself so I don't have to literally switch hardware and software completely. I prefer the consistency of iOS hardware and the superior 3rd party app quality, and that shows no sign of changing any time soon.

Plus, the iPhone 4 is the best free phone you can get by far.

<comment><USER13> Have you seen the Nexus 4? I appreciate your liking the iOS design sensibility, but unsubsidized, you can get cutting-edge hardware for less than your 3-generation old phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I prefer Gmail since its redesign back in April.

There, I said it.

<comment><USER15> Do you have "compact mode" turned on?

I mostly like it, except the contact info side bar can cut into my email pane when I dont have my browser fullscreened.

<comment><USER10> I almost like it. I do have compact mode turned on. My biggest gripe with the newer style though is the themes/color schemes. I had my own custom color scheme all picked out in the old gmail, now I can no longer pick my own color for each and every little detail/item in gmail, which irks me quite a bit, as this is an option I used to have. I'm not big on custom background images either, I just want to choose my own colors. But hey, I'm a control freak, I guess most people just take whats given to them...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this really a step forward? It feels a little bit like a step backwards -- more like classic email clients and less like Gmail.

<comment><USER17> What feels the most like classic email clients is the way they abstract recipients by placing the contact's name into a box and no longer display the email address next to it. The pretty box is fine, but I hated seeing contacts on an email in something like Outlook and not being able to quickly confirm which address was used for that contact, so perhaps it'd be better if they had these recipients in a scrollable list.

<comment><USER18> Double-click the little lozenge with the recipient's name to turn it back into an email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail?

Midway while typing this post, I did a search and boom: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613>

<comment><USER20> _Does anyone have a comprehensive/good solution to how to move all your stuff out of Gmail?_

I use Thunderbird + IMAP to sync a local copy of my Gmail email every week or two.

It does not sync anything except your email, but even that much is pretty nice, for peace of mind.

<comment><USER19> I don't use email clients, so pardon me if this is elementary, but is there a good way to compress and archive downloaded emails with their attachments?

Also, is the formatting (rtf) preserved?

<comment><USER20> I don't know the answer to your first question, but in response to your second question, yes, formatting is preserved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can still open up emails in the larger view, If I'm not mistaken. I can see and have experienced the issue they are attempting to solve here and this seems like an ok solution. I guess we won't know until we try it. Most emails are short however, at least that should be your goal unless it's something more detailed and then you have a larger canvas to work with.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think they should add a maximize button to this window. Sometimes you just want to edit one email in full screen, and I don't think you should have to revert to the previous interface to do that.

<comment><USER23> There is an "expand" button that launches a popup window. You can then fullscreen that window.

<comment><USER22> Fine, but then you have two browser windows. I'm not used to that :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And ... addressing the content of this blog post: yet another reason mutt wins as a mail client.

Open mutt (preferably under screen so you can 'C-a "' between mail folders), view message(s) you want to reference (optionally: tag relevant messages, using mutt's filtering tools as necessary, than 'l ~T' to restrict to just the tagged messages, allowing you to rapidly reference a set of messages.

Fire up a new terminal window (I bind this to '<shift><alt>t' in my window manager) and write "mutt -s 'subject line'" to start your message, drop into the address lookup window to designate recipients, and edit away in your editor of choice.

And all of this without the multi-gigabyte overhead of a full browser session + gmail.

Oh yeah: offlineimap means you can work on your GMail account (and/or any other accounts you've configured for mutt) readily.

Just sayin'.

<comment><USER25> That sounds completely doable for 99% of internet users! Surprised my grandma hasn't already been using this exact workflow.

<comment><USER24> First off: this is Hacker News, not Grandma News.

How often has your grandmother's mail agent changed over the time she's been using it?

One of the reason us old farts have a fondness for commandline and console tools is that they have a strong tendency to remain remarkably consistent over time. I started using mutt in the late 1990s. for the past 13 years, my preferred (though far from only) email environment has changed very, very little.

Other than mutt, I've used at various points in time: BSD mail, BSD mailx, cc:mail, various versions of Microsoft Mail / Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, Lotus Notes (ugh!), the VMS mail client, elm, pine, Mail.app, Evolution, Sylpheed, KMail, the Palm Centro mail app, the Android mail app, K9Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail, Microsoft OWS, Zimbra, and others.

It's not that I haven't tried the alternatives. It's that when it comes down to it, mutt fits my needs, workflow, and practices better than the others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good.

The most annoying thing to me about gmail's interface is center-clicking on something (to reference it, like something in a mailing list) and having the entire window redirected.

This is cool :)

<comment><USER27> You can use Ctrl+left-click to get the same 'open in new tab' behaviour as middle-click.

I do agree that broken middle-click is hugely annoying. I'd much prefer they fixed that though, rather than introducing a non-standard popup as the default left-click behaviour.

I don't really understand why they hijacked middle-click in the first place. Does anyone actually use middle-click + drag to scroll? I would've assumed the majority have scroll wheels? Is this some accessibility thing that I'm missing?

<comment><USER9> This was more of an oversight of some other changes than a conscious decision. It's definitely a known issue though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting that they took this approach primarily for email referencing. Is it that common of a use case that it's worth changing the entire experience around it (and collapsing the formatting bar, etc.)? I'm assuming they tested some sort of referencing UI in the existing compose screen. Wish I could see that. Also, I'm wondering how image insertion works; modals upon modals can be pretty awkward for users.

My real pet peeve: can we start removing "Compose" from email vocabulary?

</comment><comment><USER29> Ahhh, it's good to see more useful desktop features making their way online (how old is multi-tasking?). Now we wait for the gmail OS that can run applications...

</comment><comment><USER30> I would really appreciate if Google took some time to work on the speed issues we now experience with Gmail instead of working on this cosmetic changes.

I use Gmail basically ever since it was on early early stages (I even pay for more storage for years now) and the degradation of performance is the one thing that makes me think of leaving the service for something snappier.

<comment><USER15> How much data do you have?

My personal gmail has less than 3gb, and I dont notice any performance issues.

<comment><USER31> I experience performance issues a fair amount in gmail now. The issues are network related. Such as sending a message or just loading your inbox can take forever and error out.

<comment><USER30> That's exactly what I experience on a daily basis too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It seems like many people don't like this, but I had this exact issue last night. And opening another tab takes a while to load simply because the gmail app is so big. So while I'm not sure about this exact implementation yet, it could be a nice feature.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it looks great. Many times I've opened gmail in another tab to find some info.

</comment><comment><USER34> On a meta-note, I hate, hate HATE how this blog and G+ blog posts hijack the space bar. I use spacebar as page down and it never works in G+, and it doesn't on this blog either.

<comment><USER35> Spacebar works fine for me in G+ Stream page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I will enjoy this a lot, because I do often save drafts to go looking for some other message in my inbox. However, I think it saves valuable seconds, not minutes. :-)

</comment><comment><USER36> I welcome this change if they implement it well. I sometimes keep two gmail windows open so that I can compose in one while I reference emails or search in the other.

</comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone else suffer from EXTREMELY slow gmail. This happens for me across all devices, browsers, and even IMAP. 30+ seconds to load messages sometimes and lots of 17, 317 and 503 errors.

I've tried every recommendation, and of course hear nothing back from their support or in their forums. Gmail is almost unusable for me now.

Any recommendations or contacts would be appreciated. It seems the only way to get help from Google is to know someone.

<comment><USER38> This is usually caused by having a lot of devices polling your G-mail account. Go to this link: <https://www.google.com/accounts/IssuedAuthSubTokens>

and remove any that are old/you aren't using. You'll see a speed up.

<comment><USER37> Thanks. More exceedingly obtuse Google UI. There were a couple apps I could remove with access to Gmail, but doubtful that is the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ugh. Gmail continues to roll out new features and arbitrary tweaks, yet the bugs impeding normal tasks continues to grow. I've said it before: can I just have gmail beta back?

(The main ones for me are the compose window never actually loading, or new messages in a thread not displaying (both requiring a refresh). Meanwhile, the chat hover has changed layout twice. Seriously?)

</comment><comment><USER40> I tried it and it is annoying. Compose window is located in the lower right corner of the screen, and cannot be moved to the middle.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know if there's a way to try this out before they roll it out? It doesn't mention anything about it on the blog.

</comment><comment><USER41> Speaking on a tangent. Has anybody not found it annoying that you can't auto- BCC yourself in Gmail? Only if you do so does it pull up the message thread to the top which I prefer to keep track of timelines. I would be fine without the BCC as long as the thread reflects my response time. Either way, room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone else get annoyed when replying to threads with multiple people?

I always want to reply to the most recent message, but usually someone else responds while I am composing. So I have to view their message and reply to that instead of to the original message. Does this happen to anyone else, or am I taking crazy pills?

<comment><USER42> No, that happens to me all the time. Gmail used to have a "new messages have been added to the conversation" popup when that occurred, but now that doesn't always happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What gmail really needs to change is the "reply" box. When I'm composing a regular email I get a nice big box in which to type my email. When I'm typing a reply email I just have a little tiny (vertically tiny) box to type my reply. Why?????? So annoying.

</comment><comment><USER44> That looks great!

It feels to me though that google is still playing serious catch-up to it's main competitors (yahoo & microsoft) in the email arena who both have great web-mail solutions that don't get the accolades they deserve.

Now all I need is full folder support and I'm happy!

<comment><USER45> Maybe Y!, but ermm, Microsoft has a great web-mail product? Are you referring to something other than Hotmail? Because ads aside (bills have to get paid), I find Hotmail to be infuriatingly bad with its UI. Multiple lines of text-only toolbars (hard to find what I want), one text box to search the web and another to search mail (and I always get the web one when searching mail), and just too much non-mail crap on the screen.

That said, HM does seem to have some nice features such as a decent spam filter (finally; it used to be laughable) and easy unsubscribe. But bury it under a poor UI and I just dread using it.

Or maybe when you say "great web-mail" it's blindingly obvious to everyone but me that you're referring to something else, in which case ignore me. :)

<comment><USER44> I'm referring to outlook.com on the microsoft side. You can read more about it here: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044422690457756...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577561131545052576.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> don't like this at all, it looks like a step backwards, let the windows manager handle windows instead of doing it inside your webapp, next thing you know they are going to add a taskbar on the browser for each open pseudo- window

</comment><comment><USER47> Good. I wonder if this also addresses the problem when you are replying to a long chain of email conversation, the compose box includes the entire chain while also displaying the chain above the compose box. Very unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER48> or you could just use the old html version of gmail, and open as many messages as you like in different tabs.

<http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html>

</comment><comment><USER49> It's amazing, when you ask "why would you need a whole page for composing an email?" there is no good answer. Someone dozens of years ago probably made that decision and it's just stuck.

<comment><USER50> Depends. I use Sparrow and despite the coolness of the "mini text area for reply - kind of like an IM response", I often prefer opening the compose in a new window as I might be interested in cc'ing others or sending with options, layout, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> How is this return to popups any different to the option that's always been present, shift-click to open compose in a new window. Personally, I liked having the choice.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been using this side-by-side with the old UX on my personal account for weeks (months?). Much prefer the new UX. Glad it's finally launching.

</comment><comment><USER53> I like it. I cannot count the number of times I've just popped open a new gmail tab to address this exact shortcoming.

</comment><comment><USER54> awesome! this makes up quite a bit of the love they lost with their abyssmal redesign earlier this year!

</comment><comment><USER55> Am I missing something or is there no way to pick the sender address in the new composer?

<comment><USER56> Clicking on recipients line reveals CC, Bcc and From.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Might be good, but I can't use this until they support canned responses again.

</comment><comment><USER58> The Sparrow team hard at work

</comment><comment><USER59> Looks like pushing google plus to all gmail users.

</comment><comment><USER60> Yahoo mail has half those features already

</comment><comment><USER61> I use IMAP :)

</comment><comment><USER62> Why is this so important that it reaches top spot in minutes. My links to curing cancer with ultrasound or creating ai get nothing, but the big G opens a new window for compose and it's a giant leap for humanity!

Peter Norvig gave singularity summit talk on exciting work they're doing [http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_...](http://fora.tv/2012/10/14/Peter_Norvig_Channeling_the_Flood_of_Data) , why isn't that top spot?

HN is kowtowing to the pseudo-brogrammer crowd.

<comment><USER63> Let's see why :

\- "curing cancer" has been announced many times, and until now every proposed therapy has had at best limited success

\- likewise, "creating ai" has been in the news time to time. We seem to be always on the verge of true ai and the singularity, but it has not happened yet.

OTOH, many people here use gmail - I do, and I have been bothered by this compose thing.

To see the issue actually addressed, with proof, and hopefully with an implementation that I can use in the next few days, is more valuable to me that a potential cancer cure or potential ai - especially since I don't have cancer.

These are worthy goals, but until there is some real advance, why bother?

It's a market economy - someone solving a problem I have is more valuable to me that someone advancing in the resolution of a problem I don't have.

<comment><USER62> The failed cancer cures were biomolecules. This is about literally cooking it with beams, something hackers with a few hundreds in parts could attempt to do.

The AI advance is seen as an advance by Peter Norvig (head of Google Research) himself.

Both of them are hacker relevant potentially profitable business with huge upsides. Real advances can be made, especially by the hacker crowd. There's too much of a web 2.0 filter bubble going on here.

<comment><USER63> The failed cancer cures were not just biomolecules - things like freezing the cancers in place, preventing the growth of new blood vessels, etc.

If you're more into cooking, it is something we already do with various particles - and with multiple beams to minimize damage to surrouding tissues (google for gamma knife)

It's a good thing Peter Norvig sees an advance. It'd be much better when that feeling is shared by the scientific community.

Real advances can be made, and there is indeed a web 2.0 filter here - <USER2> effort being spent on barely interesting things. The human race can do so much better.

But curing cancer, ai, whole brain emulation etc. are topics which will require a long sustained effort - if only because we are constrained by our technology!

It's not a matter of capital - these problems just can't be correctly addressed with our current technology.

It's a good thing if we are making steps in the right directions, but it's very unlikely these problems will be solved very soon, therefore my interest in news about such problems is quite low, even with a deep interest in them!

So I guess it's just natural that other readers find such things even less newsworthy :-(

<comment><USER62> I see where you're coming from, but ultrasound is not like gamma knife, it truly is revolutionary (no sides effects + very cheap), and I'd put Norvig inside the science community of AI, he's head researcher of the premier AI company after all. These are current technologies, not futuristic, that are enabled by moore's law. You're assuming that what the crowd sees is what's right, and that isn't always right. The crowd didn't see search engines as important in the 90s but they were wrong.

Anyway, I'm not offended by gmail news, just wanted to get some ultrasound and some ai in there and put things in context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> _facepalm_

All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in.

Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.

<comment><USER65> I seem to recall that both Google search and Gmail were initially popular with technically sophisticated users. I remember proselytising this amazing new search engine to people still using Lycos, or Yahoo, or Alta Vista, or whatever it was back then.

I used to be able to get very accurate results in Google search with judicious use of quotes, excluded terms, and exact phrases. Now, Google second-guesses what I really meant, and usually gives me a result that's more generic, more mainstream, but not actually what I was looking for.

The contemporary services are better for people who don't understand sets, and who don't really know how to use the more esoteric features of their browser. That's not necessarily bad, but it's bad for us. But we'll cope: there's no shortage of alternative email clients.

<comment><USER66> If you want to mention some recent searches that disappointed you, I'm happy to pass that on to the quality team here.

If you're unhappy that Google is trying to autocorrect spelling or add/remove search terms, you might try the verbatim search tool: [http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using- your-t...](http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms- verbatim.html)

<comment><USER64> Good to see that PR is on the job of trying to convince people that they don't really want what they really want. It's funny that even verbatim search asks me if I'm sure that I spelt something correctly. I guess our definitions over verbatim differ but to me, in this context, it means "do this and stop second guessing me kthnx." It's also annoying that I have to switch to another mode every time I want to search. There appears to be no setting to set verbatim as the default and even if there was, one would either need to always be on the same computer (if the preference is saved in a cookie) or always signed in (if it's set on the account).

A suggestion - provide a subdomain with the old search, e.g. old.google.com. All of the mainstream customers get whatever UX/marketing think is best for them and everyone else gets to keep using a tool which they find useful - everyone wins!

Oh, and since you might be the right person to ask, why is Quora still turning up in search results when they censor most of the thread? They're even worse than Experts Exchange (and why are they still turning up in results too?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is great. I've hated having to open multiple tabs to be able to reference an old email(s) and compose a new one at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER68> Are we stupid or something? First, why the hell are we arguing over the freakin' theme here? Seriously. This tangent discussion should be removed. If you want to complain about the stupid theme, which I also find it hard to use, start your own thread.

Secondly, are we stupid for using these annoying shift, control shortcuts? Google is not reinventing the wheel. Google is not used by elite computer programmers. I don't even use emacs because I am a VIM user. GMail is used by over a billion user and most of them don't even know some shortcuts or nice ways to make their tasks better.

I don't know all the secrets you guys are pointing out, and are you going to call me stupid? This is not reinventing wheel. It's just making the app more usable.

If anyone start spamming me with "you can already do this with X, Y , Z ways but it's not known by everyone...".

<comment><USER68> wow I am getting downvoted by haters because I am telling the truth.</comment></comment>


Crystal: PHP microframework based on anonymous functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/EmanueleMinotto/crystal/wiki

<comment><USER2> Why use this instead of Slim? Slim is basically a fully-baked version of this (with a similar router), and it's decoupled, so you can use only the parts that you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's more an experiment than a real microframework, it's absolutely not recommended for production. The contributing page should sound like a challenge :) [https://github.com/EmanueleMinotto/crystal/wiki/Contributing](https://github.com/EmanueleMinotto/crystal/wiki/Contributing)

<comment><USER2> What's the point of these restrictions?

They're not strange/crazy enough to make it a fun programming challenge, and for something that's intended for use (even non-production use) they make the code less usable.

"No namespaces" and "no new functions or classes" in particular don't make any sense. Anonymous functions are just like functions, except they're harder to identify in a stack trace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It looks interesting, but maybe consider setting it up as a Composer package?

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered it, but for some reasons I didn't do it:

1\. the main closure is useless if the .php file isn't included manually using require(_once)/include(_once) functions ( [https://github.com/EmanueleMinotto/crystal/wiki/Tip](https://github.com/EmanueleMinotto/crystal/wiki/Tip) ) because it returns directly at line 144 2\. the autoloader become useless too, because there's Composer that does it very well 3\. the PHP world is full of great frameworks, microframeworks, routers and other components, it will become rapidly a common library and not a good library because it doesn't follow development best practices but only a set of rules (defined in the CONTRIBUTING.md file)

Crystal can't be packed in a Composer package, but Composer can be used in a project including crystal.

<comment><USER3> I like the minimalism of it - but I really don't like returning a value from an include like that.

Just seems wrong.

Personal preference though.</comment></comment></comment>


Verifying the authenticity of 3000 leaked Syrian emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/14/how-know-assad-emails-genuine

<comment><USER2> It is impossible for the Guardian to verify the authenticity of the emails as a whole. It is quite possible that they are a mix of real emails from the regime plus intelligence agency injected disinfo, conveniently leaked as the drums for war against Syria line up for parade. Indeed, if you ran an intelligence agency, who would you 'leak' such a bundle of 'evidence' to? The courageous, crusading, twittering Guardian or the shunned, vulgar NWS stable?</comment>


Feedback on Idea: dashnine.org - <AUTHOR> http://kindling.dashnine.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I've been floored ever since discovering this community. A group of people with similar interests to mine that I didn't even know existed. Finding this community led me to an idea. What if there was software to help people find communities? Especially those who want to promote something. After doing some reading on correlation algorithms, I put together kindling. Let me know what you think. ~~ Raphael

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting. Is this a side project or a portfolio piece? Or are you looking for feedback on how to build a business on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now this is a tech demo. Looking for feedback on the idea itself. If I find I've hit a nerve (i.e. a problem others want solved) then I would like to move forward with the business building route.

<comment><USER2> I think the idea as currently implemented would have low usage. Not that its not technically incredible, but I would put it into the category of a hobby site rather than a business. Its a fun thing to do, but people have many, many ways of finding different communities, and actually, its kind of fun to search through the different ones until you find something that fits you back. Are you a TechCrunch person, a YC person, a DIGG person? All of them? Its kind of an emotional thing to find a "community." In order to go from hobby site to business you'd need to get people to come back repeatedly, and searching for a new community just isn't something a person does often. The numbers for a business just aren't there.

However, with any problems, there are always ideas for solutions. For example, if you really did want to turn this into a business, you'd have to solve the problems above. Find people who would search for related communities often, and who want to do it quickly and with good results.

I think one idea would be to focus on your notion of promoting something. The people who do this for a job are PR or media placement people. They might need this sort of thing. When they have a client that wants to get the word out, or wants to advertise to their audience, one important consideration for a P.R. or media placement person usually is" "well, where can we find their audience?" A company might tell them, "well, this is where we usually go to tell people what our new product is." And a P.R. person could use your site and say "have you tried X, Y, or Z too?"

So thats just an idea. Obviously, tuning the site to P.R. people and seeing if it makes sense is a lot of work, but thats really what separates a business from a hobby. This is exactly where you run into the classic hacker's dilemma (ok, its not classic, but it sounded like a nice phrase): turning your mad coding skills into something that people actually want. It can be a coding marvel, but until people actually want it, its not a business.

It sounds like you have the skills down, you just need an idea. Apparently, around here they're a dime a dozen, so if you're here to build a business, your execution skills will come in handy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the well thought out reply. I'll post the link to Sphinn.com (a Digg-like site for PR/Marketing folks) and get their take.

Part of my goal getting involved here is to find potential partners. Has anyone used HN to do that?

<comment><USER2> I assume so. People post stuff all the time looking for founders or new employees.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Online service to send batch SMS to the team (worldwide) - s-stude

Hi,
What do you think about a web service, that will allow people send batch SMS to their team / friends over the world?
You open a web page, enter your cell phone # and enter so many other phine numbers you want (event from other countries). then you enter your message and then you click Send. This message will be send to people.
Let's say user gonna pay 1/2/3 $ for this batch send.
What do you think about this? <comment><AUTHOR> Strategy to fight spam?

<comment> s-stude No, it should not be spam, something meaningful.</comment></comment>


Genetics Basics for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/genetics-basics_hxa7241_2003.html <comment><AUTHOR> After reading through "A T Cell Army against SARS-CoV-2" and not getting much out of it, I started looking for a primer on how viruses infect cells. But without a strong background in biology, even that was somewhat out of reach for me. This article started to frame the idea of DNA as a DSL for generating molecules, which put me on better footing.</comment>


How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150428-how-quantum-pairs-stitch-space-time/

<comment><USER2> The Escher work used as illustration (re: Demons, et. al.) has a decidedly fractal look about it, which prompts the thought that the entanglement described in the article could be understood as a multidimensional fractal.

Kind of like the way polymerization of organic molecules occurs in specific ways and produces shaped structures accordingly, entangled particles build space-time shapes depending on patterns of entanglement, and perhaps not necessarily always the same pattern, leaving unevenness of space-time shape.

Just musing about the significance of the idea. It certainly has a lot of intuitive appeal.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Even if your lump of gold has just 100 atoms, each with a quantum "spin" that can be either up or down, the total number of possible states totals 2[^]100, or a million trillion trillion. With every added atom the problem grows exponentially worse. (And worse still if you care to describe anything in addition to the atomic spins, which any realistic model would.) "If you take the entire visible universe and fill it up with our best storage material, the best hard drive money can buy, you could only store the state of about 300 spins," said Swingle. "So this information is there, but it's not all physical. No one has ever measured all these numbers."_

I realize this is likely a translation error, but the amount of space required to keep the state of 300 up/down spins is 300 bits, or 38 bytes.

Now, the space to keep all possible states of 300 spins, that's different. That's what lazy evaluation (and a lot of time on your hands!) is for.

<comment><USER4> The article is actually correct - the general state of a system of 300 spins is described by 2^300 complex amplitudes. The remaining question is how much memory you are willing to spend per amplitude but with two doubles it will take 2.6 * 10^92 bits. You only get away with 300 amplitudes if the spins are not entangled and the state of the system therefore is a product state, i.e. you can factor the state of the system into 300 independent states, one per spin.

A two spin system for example has the general state

      a |DD> + b |DU> + c |UD> + d |UU>

requiring four complex amplitudes, not two bits only selecting one of the basis states.

EDIT: Could not resist. The storage density of a 15 mm thick 2 TB 2.5" hard disk is 152.7 Ebit/m³. With the number from above this yields 2 * 10^27 ly³ for the volume which is not to far from the visible universe with 4 * 10^32 ly³ according to Wikipedia. Okay, it is a factor of 200,000 but that will only buy you 17 more bits plus some space for cable routing.

<comment><USER5> This seems like a clasic analog issue. Does adding 1 spin to a 300 spin system add _exactly_ 2^300 bits of information and 1 spin to a 2 spin situation _exactly_ 2^2 = 4 bits of information?

<comment><USER6> As mentioned elsewhere, bits are probably the wrong way to think about it. Does it really double the size of your Hilbert space? Yes.

Perhaps this will help clarify why it is different. In the classical case, adding one more spin is doubling the size of your set. In the quantum mechanical case, adding one more spin instead doubles the dimensionality of the space of possible states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been recently studying Lisp/Scheme, and I couldn't help but relate these "Quantum Pairs" with cons cells and the relationship described as a tree data structure. (Not equating them here, just a musing of mine.)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's analogies all the way down.

<comment><USER9> The use of Lies to Children in scientific and mathematical writing tends to send me scurrying to Wikipedia to look up what's really going on, yeah.</comment></comment>


Why Tablets Will Succeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353365,00.asp

<comment><USER2> And another important point: There's a lot of momentum (possibly misguided, but it's there) toward "paperless" everything right now, but the problem is that you can't just draw all over a PDF. Rather, you _can_ draw all over things, but it's super awkward with a mouse, and my pencil has a fantastic user interface that's hard to beat.

Tablets, though? Here's a device that promises to actually let me use my great UI (pen/pencil/stylus) to actually draw all over documents I want to edit. I think that _that_ , together with the desire to go paperless, is going to be a big factor in wide adoption of tablets.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Tablets Will Fail: They're too big to fit in your pocket. They're awkward to use in most normal situations (ie, sitting at a desk) They will require a case for screen protection. Perhaps a case that folds open -- kinda like a laptop. Current software is designed primarily for keyboard/mouse input. Using a software keyboard and a stylus offers very little to most users who type faster than they can write. (that's one of the reasons type writers were invented in the first place, who wants to regress at this point?)

</comment><comment><USER4> Because of ergonomics, tablets will be more successful for content consumption type of activities like eBooks or entertainment, primarily on bed or sofa, but not at desk.

All input on touchscreen including innovative gestures still requires users to place their fingers directly onto their eyeballs: either with head looking down or with hands rising up. Both postures are not very productive for programming or desk jobs and can't sustain for long hours.

iPhone is more successful because of light weight and more sensors. To make tablets usage experience better, Internet tethering and sensor sharing via iPhone will help a lot.

<comment><USER5> > _"All input on touchscreen including innovative gestures still requires > users to place their fingers directly onto their eyeballs: either with head > looking down or with hands rising up. Both postures are not very productive > for programming or desk jobs and can't sustain for long hours."_

People have been doing desk jobs under just those conditions via pen and paper for hundreds of years. Is it really so uncomfortable to write on the same piece of paper that you're looking at?

<comment><USER4> Almost forgot the old days. Arguably pen writing on paper is not very productive for programming and clerk jobs (not necessarily for creative jobs). IMHO, tablets are still better for the applications which don't require too much user inputs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The iPhone is essentially a small format tablet computer so I think the question of whether tablets can succeed has been answered. As to whether large format tablet can succeed, I think they'll be quite successful as a niche product but they really need to be pocket sized for everyone to carry one.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tablets will only succeed when they have an OS designed around their features and limitations. Just mapping the touch screen to the mouse input and throwing on the latest version of Windows is not useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> While I can understand the appeal of a tablet (heck I want one) it never ceases to crack me up when I think that what got me hooked on computers initially was that it didn't matter that my handwriting sucked.

I wonder how useful these devices would be when even I can barely read my script?</comment>


Ask HN: How to improve the DX for a legacy rails app? - <AUTHOR> I recently started working on a new team that mostly maintains a legacy rails app.  What are some ways to improve the developer experience? <comment><USER2> One reasonably high-effort way is to make it more modular and testable by splitting things out into middlewares with Coach:

[https://gocardless.com/blog/getting-started-with- coach/](https://gocardless.com/blog/getting-started-with-coach/)

I've worked in this team's codebase and can confirm it has a rather nice DX, even as a new joiner with a python background.

——

Who are the people who want to improve the developer experience?

</comment><comment><USER3> RubyMine to keep your sanity - in large codebases rails is terrible with ambiguity. You don't know what a variable is, if it's a function, a method in the class, a helper imported, what.

Then leverage the test suite to understand what something is supposed to do, naming conventions only take you so far especially if the team wasn't really disciplined about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've found that great, modern IDEs (like those made by JetBrains for various languages) have vastly better support for static analysis and, therefore, refactoring.

What IDE are you using?

Other than that, running integration tests from outside that code base can at least help you catch errors early.

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe watch some Sandi Metz talks together as well as Ben Orenstein's refactoring talk and then see if you can align around some practices that you think could make your lives easier.

Code styleguide is another possible direction.</comment>


Show HN: GitHub starred page - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maguowei/starred <comment><USER2> This is very nice ! Have you somehow automated your update process to keep your list up to date ?

<comment><USER3> It seems like you could set up a webhook to trigger a Travis CI rebuild upon a new star event [0] . I'm pretty iffy on this, any ideas?. You probably need some third-party service to trigger the rebuild [1]. Obviously running your own server would make this much easier. [https://github.com/no13bus/ohmyrepo](https://github.com/no13bus/ohmyrepo) is one such example. From there it would be straightforward to generate and deploy the new README.md from Travis CI [2].

[0]: [https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/types/#watch...](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/types/#watchevent)

[1]: [https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/triggering-builds](https://docs.travis- ci.com/user/triggering-builds)

[2]: [http://krzysztofzuraw.com/blog/2016/automatic-blog- deploymen...](http://krzysztofzuraw.com/blog/2016/automatic-blog-deployment- with-travis.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> make your own awesome lists page by GitHub star!</comment>