Create a Robot Image from any text string - <AUTHOR> http://RoboHash.org <comment><AUTHOR> Morning, I created this as an extended-weekend project, after realizing that I'd need these hashes as a part of larger project I'm working on.

Basically, Text goes in, Picture of a Robot comes out.

Where I'm using this is sort of like an identicon, to help quickly identify a poster's 4096-bit public keys, and see if you're talking to the same man.

Is it perfect? No, but it's a quick visual guide to any text, in the form of faces, which are easy for people to remember.

<comment><USER2> Robohash looks great. As the 'inventor' of Identicon, I've been meaning to revisit the subject with animal (identimal) or robot (identibot) themes in mind so it's nice to see your rendition of the later. Well done, sir.

<comment><AUTHOR> Identicons are a great idea, I really love them.. They're a good solution to a gut-check "Something is wrong here.."

Sort of like a SSH-fingerprint.

The problem I've had with them is that they're generate not all that memorable. Was that triangles pointing left, then up, or up then left?

This is my attempt at addressing that problem for my own new project, but I'd love to see what you build! If you want to use these images, feel free. They're CC-BY, so they're open to the world now ;)

<comment><USER2> Re 'not all that memorable', that's because identicons were originally designed for 'distinguishing' and 'matching' data, not 'memorizing'.

Abstract geometric identicons like my original implementation as well as variations used at Wordpress and StackOverflow are, while nearly impossible to remember, distinguishable in a pile which comes in handy when distinguishing the 'voice' of individuals in a long thread of comments.

To use identicons as permanent identity, one has to 'identify' with their identicon. We can identify faces of our friends because we shared memories with them, stories if you will.

So robotic identicons like yours can be made more memorable if users had some ways to create a story they can associate with it like 'blue viking with left arm missing', etc.

<comment><USER3> Using stories is a great idea, but I'm not sure how doable it is to generate images that suggest a story (certainly, harder than cute variations on robots); in addition, those stories have to be memorable i.e. make sense, as stories. I think that's approaching a hard problem, maybe even hard AI.

But I like the idea. Perhaps the image problem could be met by combining it with a bio (giving a story); and the "make sense" problem could be addressed by a story grammar (following the hero's myth as a template, with recursive and optional parts), written using templates consisting of canned pseudo- english sentences with gaps filled by a set of names, objects, places that play the various roles in the "hero grammar": the key, the sword, the grail, the shadow, the mentor, the ordinary world, the special word, various thresholds - perhaps some word generation for place names. If the story _made sense_ , as a journey, it might be memorable, even stirring in an awkward way, despite all the grammar/template/presets...

Of course, maybe I'm wrong: "<color> <warriortype> with <injury>" is already fairly rich. Even, extending it to incongruous occupations (surgeon, nurse, motorcyclist, developer). Perhaps, like theatresports, just starting points of a place, occupation and problem is enough to suggest a story to the user?

<comment><USER2> Right. If employees of Apple gets certificates with O = "Apple" and OU = "Engineering" which maps to a red apple badge on their robot's body and a gear mark on the arm, people could potentially learn to 'parse' that at a glance.

Everywhere we look in RL, there are stories being told all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love this, simply because <http://robohash.org/mattbearman> kinda looks like me :D

My one criticism is that it took me while to figure out (and I'm web dev) It wasn't clear until quite far down the page that you need to just put the text string after the URL.

I'd recommend having a text box into which pasted text can be robohashed prominent on the homepage, as well as clearer instructions.

Edit: just noticed there is a text box, was that there before? It could definitely be more noticeable :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have added a box in the Last 5 minutes based on user-feedback. It's kinda a hack, but.. It's there ;)

<comment><USER4> Ah cool, its good to see you respond quickly to feedback

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's similar to the StackOverflow April Fools' Unicorn Avatars: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits- full...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/37328/my-godits-full-of- unicorns)

Which you can try out at: <http://unicornify.appspot.com/use-it>

<comment><AUTHOR> Woah, That's really cool! I hadn't seen that, but yes, it's designed to be along the same idea, except more year-round friendly ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You write _really_ good web site copy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. The whole project is very silly, so it doesn't make much sense to take it very seriously ;)

<comment><USER7> I'm impressed that you got an endorsement from Cave Johnson. It must be nice having friends like that.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, it was just a pre-recorded message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be awesome if <http://robohash.org/google.jpg> generated a jpg, and <http://robohash.org/google.png> generated a png.

It would be even more awesome if <http://robohash.org/favicon.ico> generated a .ico file.

<comment><AUTHOR> Google.jpg does generate a jpg, but it's not the same as google.png;

The reason for that is that I'm hashing whatever you send in, including the extension.. Otherwise, if you passed file.txt and file.mp3 they'd come to the same hash.

<comment><USER9> I realize what you're doing. This was more of a "really cool feature request" than a bug report.

favicon.ico does respond with a 404 though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> OMG - π-bot has a cylindrical head! <http://robohash.org/3.14159>

<comment><USER11> Looks better than Tau-bot :)

<http://static1.robohash.com/6.28318>

<comment><USER12> They do have the same smile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So THIS is what the Googlebot looks like!

<http://robohash.org/google>

<comment><USER14> Bing just looks like a goofy hipster.

<http://robohash.org/bing>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is broken. I entered, "Bite my shiny, metal ass!" and all I got was some weird, Barney-like purple robot. I'd suggest special sub-routines for certain phrases including, but not limited to: "Ex-Ter-Mi-NATE!", "Danger, Will Robinson!", "Crush, Kill, Destroy!", "Beedeebeedeebeedeebeedee!", "We've got movie sign!", "Blah, blah, blah", "I'll be back", etc.

;)

<comment><AUTHOR> For 2.0, I'll add ?popculture=yes ;)

<comment><USER16> Hah, that'd be awesome! One of the first strings I tried was "bender". Considering how fast the image loaded, I'm guessing it was already cached from other users doing the same :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I quickly made a bookmarklet to robotize HN usernames:

      javascript:(document.body.innerHTML=document.body.innerHTML.replace(/([^<]+)<\/a>/g,'$2'))()

</comment><comment><USER18> The Html source has a random robot as part of the author signature. This is neat!

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow! Very nice morning treat :-)

R2D2 and C3P0 look like this:

<http://robohash.org/c3p0.png> <http://robohash.org/r2d2.png>

C3P0's got horns!!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised no one's posted anything from set2 or set3, or included any backgrounds ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it pretty clever to generate Robot faces rather than whole robots or other pictures. Human brains are optimized for face recognition, which is why we can tell even minor differences in faces far easier than minor differences in other pictures.

Therefore, generating human faces would serve this purpose even better, but those are at risk of falling into the uncanny valley. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley>)

Using clearly non-human faces (such as Robot faces) avoids that problem.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is brilliant.

We have a stress testing tool that uses little images of various robots in its UI to represent different test patterns ... now I can automate them!

</comment><comment><USER22> What sort of "Super-Awesome new forum" is this for?

</comment><comment><USER23> It has a problem with the current and parent directory links. (I don't know if it's possible to fix.)

<http://robohash.org/>. (doesn't work)

<http://robohash.org/.>. (doesn't work)

<http://robohash.org/..>. (does work!)

</comment><comment><USER24> Very very nice. This has convinced me to use this technique for non-player characters in a game I am working on. I see you licensed the artwork from three artists. Did you have it especially drawn for you, or was it already released under some CC license?

<comment><AUTHOR> I had it drawn for the project at 99designs.

<comment><USER25> What was your design brief for this? The results are so cool, so should the brief.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An easy way to flip the images left and right would be great. I love the first set of robots, but I wouldn't use them in my website as they'd be placed on the far left of the browser window, looking away from the page.

<comment><USER27> you could always use css: <http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/flip-an-image/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If/when you debut the [robohash] watermark in the image, it would be great if you would also debut a paid plan without the watermark. Plus, paid plans give people confidence that your service will continue to exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it would be pretty silly to add a paid plan to a weekend project. ;)

I'll only do that, with the watermark, if it goes over what my bottom-rung Linode+CDN can deliver.

<comment><USER29> It's not silly for people who are actually using this. I'd rather pay for the service than living with the uncertainty of getting a banner because you can't pay your CDN bills. That's really the only thing that prohibits me from using this service in anything useful anyway. It looks very nice so that clearly would be a waste.

<comment><USER30> Download the source from github !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31>
        Dr. Chandra, RobotCrunch

Subtle jab at Arrington? =)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Testimonials, and the hover-text on the robots change on every reload. Try it! Hammer the site more ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The similarity between <http://robohash.org/yes>

and <http://robohash.org/no>

is striking.

<comment><USER33> there's something wrong with the algorithm, the yes guy looks like he's saying no

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love some of the alt-text on the robots. Very polished.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was my favorite part. There are a few fun bits scattered around the webpage.

<comment><USER34> also the robots in the source code!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Strange. No matter WHAT STRING I ENTER, it ALWAYS creates the SAME robot. Is this site just a psychological experiment designed to collect user names??

<comment><AUTHOR> Were you in Firefox, by chance? There was a difference in the FF evaluates the JS, versus Webkit, when retrieving document.form, so I switched it to getelementbyid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anyone else notice the Microsoft bot has a 7 (as in Windows 7) on its head?

<http://robohash.org/microsoft>

</comment><comment><USER37> I like it but shouldn't it do similarity instead of producing a unique bot? For example, "similar" strings should produce similar bots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm generating the bots by reading the bits from a SHA1 hash, so they won't be very similar on an english-text level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sad to see Bender in this state: <http://static1.robohash.com/bender>

</comment><comment><USER39> If I put a % anywhere in the string (except at the end where I think it is ignored) it doesn't give me my robot, but a broken link!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's doing a URL decode to store them. I think that a % is not valid in a URL..

From <http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/4_URI_Recommentations.html->

The percent sign ("%", ASCII 25 hex) is used as the escape character in the encoding scheme and is never allowed for anything else.

I'll try to see why it's not converting it after work.

<comment><USER40> Same problem with a string of just spaces. It seems the string being hashed isn't URL-encoded first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> this is cute. if anyone is looking for a more abstract approach i threw some code together a year ago that generates colourful "mosaics" - <http://www.acooke.org/hash-icons.html> (i really need to improve the page and release the code...)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the mosiacs; They remind me of a prettier version of identicons.

My concern was just that people won't remember a random pattern of dots very well.

<comment><USER41> yeah, i agree. on the other hand, they go smaller - i was looking for something that would label users on a feed of short comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> if you go to <http://static1.robohash.com/> you get the same page as <http://robohash.org/> but the IP used is not my IP.

nice project though. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Static1.robohash.com goes through the CDN.. If you load a PNG through there, it's cached. I wouldn't do the whole site through there, though, or you'll get the CDN's IP!

<comment><USER42> i figured it was something like that but i felt i should mention it just in case.

your concept did a good job in alerting me that the IP that was supposed to me mine was not :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Any open/permissive license on the output and/or code?

<comment><AUTHOR> CC BY 3.0 on the Images, BSD on the code.

<comment><USER44> Who should I attribute as the creator of the robot images? You, the website, or the author of the hashed plain-text?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just attribute it to RoboHash.org, that should be fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


defaults write com.evernote.Evernote HideAdsInSourceList YES - the-kenny

<comment> the-kenny For Evernote on OS X, this disables all ads. Nice example on how not to implement ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not convinced it does; as I used the above defaults write and then fired up Evernote on OSX only to see adds...</comment></comment>


Pushing code to GitHub as Linus Torvalds - <AUTHOR> http://www.jayhuang.org/blog/pushing-code-to-github-as-linus-torvalds/ <comment><USER2> You can't stop this without breaking git. There is no master repository in git, where user access can be checked. As far as a git repo is concerned, you could easily be checking in a commit Linus sent you, in which case it would be doing the exactly right thing.

If you want confirmation that a certain person has done something in git, you'll have to have them sign the commit in some fashion.

github is correcting in politely passing this off as a non-issue.

<comment><USER3> This is one of many reasons why we still use SVN. Every commit is authenticated against our LDAP server so is technically signed against a user based on their credentials.

<comment><USER4> ... you can sign your git commits with GPG, which is a hell of a lot better than "technically signed" via random internal LDAP and implied relationships.

Git has an intentional separation between author of a commit, and the person who signed-off on it. So if you hired an outside contractor to work a little bit of code, he could write it, send it to you, and then an internal person with a GPG key would review it and sign-off on it. It would retain the original author (contractor) and it would retain the person who put it into your code and "signed off" on it.

What other non-reasons do you have for using SVN?

<comment><USER5> It's a hell of a lot simpler if you don't need a ton of branches, and better integrated with Windows.

<comment><USER4> There are lots of wonderful integrations / applications for windows now. The days of windows being awful with Git are behind us.

Hell of a lot simpler if you don't need ANY branches. Merging is still a goddamn nightmare with SVN.

<comment><USER6> > There are lots of wonderful integrations / applications for windows now. The > days of windows being awful with Git are behind us.

Please tell me more, how I can get behind Git being awful on Win7 since I have to use this OS at work (and since I've been on Linux personally for a few years, I have no clue). I have only some crappy git console and my config even doesn't work outside of it. Thank you.

<comment><USER7> msysgit + tortoise git make it pretty simple, and Visual Studio 2013 has built in git support (however I've not used it very much)

<comment><USER6> I don't use VS, and as it turns out, the crappy console I'm talking about is this msysgit. The lack of a decent consistent terminal is my biggest pain in win7. cmd, powershell, msysgit - they all are total crap and every one works differently. And my Git settings aren't working from Eclipse, basically the only place they work is this git terminal. Sorry, but that's not 'wonderful integration'. On Linux everything _just works_.

<comment><USER5> Really? In my Linux experience it's a lot more rare for things to 'just work' than on Windows. Windows' homogenous environment contributes to this.

<comment><USER6> If by "things" you mean customer software support then yes, but development environments work consistently and are dead easy to set up. YMMV if you work on MS tech (.net, etc.), I don't. TBH one of my main reasons to move to Linux a few years ago is because I was pissed off by this particular problem (how to do it + ok and now tell me how to do it on windows and why half of what you describe doesn't work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can set the From: field of an e-mail to <email@example.com> and similarly impersonate Linus in an e-mail. Clearly e-mail is broken.

<comment><USER9> Many would argue that email IS broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If a solution to this is really needed (which seems somewhat dubious), github could allow people to register pgp public keys with their account and then users could sign their commits. Github could then indicate that a commit is verified as being from that user.

<comment><USER4> Git already has this, it is already a thing, since 1.7.9. I can sign my commits, you can validate my signature, if we both care, it is out there already.

<comment><USER10> I'm aware. I'm saying github could provide an interface to indicate verified signatures to the github account. It's because git has signed commits that this suggestion is even possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 'I understand this feature has the benefits of allowing people to push commits with emails they don't own, such as 'email@example.com' that I occasionally use, but having your commits attributed to a different user is a whole different issue.'

More than that it makes it so the distributed nature of Git is preserved. If I pull from someone who committed a bunch of stuff under their own name but isn't a user on GitHub, then push up to GitHub, GitHub won't be able to just reject the commits from the user who is not on GitHub - it will have to reject the push entirely. Thus, there is no way around this without losing all the benefits of Git.

Perhaps a way around it would be to sign all commits where the committer has the same email address as an existing GitHub user, and then check the signature against the GitHubber's known key, and reject it if the signature doesn't check out.

But having to sign commits if you are a GitHub user adds extra hasssle, and what if an unsigned commit accidentally makes its way into the history? What a pain. Everyone would always have to commit with the possibility of being able to be pushed up to GitHub in mind.

</comment><comment><USER12> Commits not pushed with a user's public key could be marked as unverified in the web UI until the logged-in user verifies ownership.

</comment><comment><USER13> That is just how git works, and there isn't really anything GitHub can do about it. Marking commits as being by the person who pushed them rather than being by the person who wrote them is the closest you could come, and that would be terrible. It's not even really fixable in a DVCS at all short of not supporting unsigned commits.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think this is a problem with GitHub, it is - if you want to call it a problem at all - a problem with git itself because noone stops you from using any email adress and name as user.email and user.name in your git config. You could do the same thing on bitbucket, your companys git repositories, git repositories on your own server etc.

<comment><USER15> Coincidentally, I just tried this on Bitbucket a couple of days ago. For your activity feed, it must check the username you used to authenticate when you pushed, not what email address is on the commit. The activity feed on my profile says the commit is mine -- however, when viewing the commit, it says it's by the other person whose email address I used. Not sure if GitHub does the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember reporting impersonation as a problem to the gitolite project years ago and was told in no uncertain terms that I just didn't understand the distributed nature of git (which was true at the time).</comment>


Google to display religious groups' anti-abortion ads - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10044511-93.html <comment><USER2> It's almost funny reading some of the comments attempting to twist the story around the US position.

In the UK abortion is very nearly approaching a non-story. The only surprise for me was that google banned the advert to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... and most publishers will ban them in their adsense setup. the end.

</comment><comment><USER4> and I will click on them every time I see them. at least twice. i think that money is better off in google's pockets.</comment>


Compiling at Compile Time - <AUTHOR> https://blog.veitheller.de/Compiling_at_Compile_Time.html <comment><USER2> "At runtime, we could use cond for that, but since that is a macro as well, we can't use it at compile time."

D'oh. Who writes a lisp with macros where you can't use macros at macro- expansion-time??

</comment><comment><USER3> In Nim:

[https://howistart.org/posts/nim/1/](https://howistart.org/posts/nim/1/)

<comment><USER4> I wrote something similar a while back (also in nim): [https://github.com/Jeff-Ciesielski/synesthesia](https://github.com/Jeff- Ciesielski/synesthesia)

When I stop being so darn busy, I do want to revisit my original project of doing the same thing for a FORTH derivative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is horrifying and awesome.

</comment><comment><USER6> See also: Compile-Time Snake [https://github.com/mattbierner/STT-C-Compile- Time-Snake](https://github.com/mattbierner/STT-C-Compile-Time-Snake)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hah, remember doing this in C++ templates when I learned C++ metaprogramming is Turing complete, back in high school. Named my library yabi "yet another brainfuck implementation". Simpler times.

</comment><comment> w-m And then there's this compile-time C compiler implemented as C++14 constant expressions of course:

[https://github.com/keiichiw/constexpr-8cc](https://github.com/keiichiw/constexpr-8cc)

Can be only months now, until somebody combines a constexpr compile-time C-to- WASM compiler with a constexpr compile-time WASM interpreter to run any software ever written, at compile time..

<comment><USER8> That would require emulating all syscalls (side-effects) to get a mock of the Real World inside the compile time environment.

<comment><USER9> the path to glory is a long and arduous one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Only lisp macros, no magic

<comment><USER11> in lisp lambda is the definition of magic

<comment><USER10> no, macros are

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In D with D "mixins": [https://github.com/m3m0ry/drainfuck](https://github.com/m3m0ry/drainfuck)

<comment><USER13> You might be better off linking directly to the source code: [https://github.com/m3m0ry/drainfuck/blob/master/source/app.d](https://github.com/m3m0ry/drainfuck/blob/master/source/app.d)

For people unfamiliar with D, a mixin is essentially equivalent to compile- time eval. you call mixin() with a string, that call then gets replaced with that string compiled as D code. Combine that with the fact that you can run arbitrary code at compile time in D and you get brainfuck-as-a-DSL in 27 lines of code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Posts like these is why I read HN religiously!</comment>


Ask HN: Best cities to live in? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say this: male, single, 24 years old, web/mobile developer, passive income covers all expenses, desire to start tech startup.<p>I know the default answer is silicon valley. But what are the other cities that I might look into, worldwide?<p>(For those interested: my plan is to live a short period of time in each promising city.) <comment><USER2> As an adult, I've personally lived in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City (where I now reside), Los Angeles, and Boulder, Co. If I had to chose one, I'd chose Boulder. Why?

\- Great tech scene.

\- Great VCs (Brad, Ryan, and the rest of the Foundry Group are a great bunch of guys).

\- Great weather (unbelievable amounts of sun every year).

\- Amazing hiking just 10 minutes outside the city. Go a little farther out (30-45 minutes) and you can follow some trails that will take your breath away (figuratively and literally :-).

\- Great skiing close by if that's your thing.

\- Great food -- not a ton of choices, but some good choices.

\- Very quick and easy access to a major airport with cheap daily parking (about 45 minute drive and if you take the tollway, you'll never -- and I mean never -- have any issues with traffic).

\- Easy access to both the east and west coast.

The downside is that Boulder is a bit homogenous. There isn't a lot of racial/ethnic diversity in my humble opinion.

<comment><USER3> The business and personal tax structure in Colorado is also better than the other choices listed above. I'll second Boulder, with Seattle as a close second (if being coastal or in a bigger city are more important to you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amsterdam NL - great for tech community and the cultural experience

Melbourne AU - also good for tech and culture, though it is closer to what you're used to (I'm assuming American)

New York US - hard to beat as a city

Important tips:

\- live only in cities where you speak the local language, but visit countries where you don't.

\- expect your productivty to be reduced by about half. Learning to live in a new country is surprisingly time consuming and the simplest of things can take hours.

\- make sure you have at least a small social group (2+ people) or way to break into a social group in the new city.

I've lived in 4 cities across 3 countries in the last 2 years and in my opinion, moving to a foreign country while beginning a startup is like trying to swim while juggling.

I still say go for it, it'll be an experience, but starting a business is hard enough without having to learn to live in a new city, so if that is your ultimate goal, stay close to what you're familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER5> Gonna throw this one out there:

Pittsburgh. It's cheap (REALLY cheap) compared to most cities and has a large talent pool of college kids (Carnegie Mellon and Pitt). Not the most exciting place to live, but for starting a company, it's probably one of the better choices. Less distractions + bad weather = lots of work gets done.

</comment><comment><USER6> Buenos Aires.

Austin.

NYC.

<comment><USER7> Coincidentally, I'm moving to Buenos Aires in the middle of January. Do you have any tips to share?

<comment><USER6> What sort of tips?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My own experience is that there's a world of difference between moving between cities every few months (with a home base), or actually living somewhere for a few years. The former is more expensive, but far less hassle and lighter on the soul.

Your view of a city will be vastly different depending on the length of your stay there. I thought Dubai was great on my first three-day visit.

Check out Taipei. It's vibrant, colorful, accessible, and lacks the heavy greyness I felt in mainland China. I dream of going back.

<comment><USER9> It's a bit dated, but Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman" is set in early '90's Taipei. I've never been, but the film seems to match somewhat my ex-roomate's experiences there.

It's also a quite enjoyable film.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like it here in Nashville, TN and the cost of living is lower than most of the other cities mentioned. We have a lot of momentum behind tech entrepreneurship here right now too.

</comment><comment><USER11> London. Pick up a book like Hawksmoor on your way in. Live by the river. Drink in some history.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seattle seems like a good place to start up, though I haven't lived there.

</comment><comment><USER13> you just wanna live there for a while not found a company there, right? then i would add these cities to your list:

madrid

zurich

perth

vancouver</comment>


New Web Security Scanner Completely FREE OF CHARGE - <AUTHOR> https://www.defensecode.com/news_article.php?id=33 <comment><USER2> From the guideline: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Submissions_

> _Please don 't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or > exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an > article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's > important._

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a GREAT IDEA</comment>


Ask HN: Is non-adjustable mobile font size a real problem? - <AUTHOR> I find myself simply passing on sites/articles where I cannot adjust the font size on mobile. Care to take a guess on the percentage of sites that users choose not to read due to non-adjustable mobile font size? I'm getting the sense that a signficant portion of ones userbase is being ignored and alienated with sites that do not have pinch-zoom functionality. If this is the case, then it's fairly low hanging competitive fruit to enable this kind of functionality. <comment><USER2> It is a problem. And you know the worst? There are "mobile" libraries like Zapto (=jQuery) which enable touch features at the expense of zooming. I didn't check the details, but the sheer idea of blocking zooming on a mobile device is plain stupid.

<comment><USER3> This frustrates me as well. The problem is that some interactions aren't possible or performant if zooming is allowed.

<comment><USER4> Why is that the case?

<comment><USER5> Many mobile browsers have a ~300ms mobile touch delay unless you disable zooming (because they wait to see if it's a double-tap zoom event). iOS is the biggest issue with this now, as I think Chrome on android better listens to some new directives to not wait

<comment><USER6> I think with iOS, even if you disable zooming, you still get that 300ms delay. A better solution would be to instead of listening to only click, listen to both click and doing interesting things with ontouchend. I recall implementing something like that a while ago, where when an element is touched (ontouchstart), I saved the X and Y coords of the touch, and when the user releases their finger (ontouchend), if the finger hasn't moved more than say 32 pixels, I fired the callback to whatever. Of course, you also need to do something to prevent triggering the event twice, but when done correctly, you get both nice quick click events and zooming.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I think there's a well-known library (or 5) around for this somewhere.

edit: [https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick](https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a problem too. I've reached the reading glasses stage and have problems with small text. I was actively looking for a solution recently, something like the Readability or Clearly extensions which work well in Chrome on the laptop but I failed to find anything like that for the iPhone. I was considering trying to make my own app to do it with the idea of using Phonegap/Javascript to read the html for a site and then process it in a Clearly type manner. I'm not quite sure if that would work? I think cross site ajax requests don't work in most browsers ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15005500/loading-cross- do...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15005500/loading-cross-domain-html- page-with-jquery-ajax)) but I vaguely recall they did work when I tried them from Phonegap on the phone.

<comment><USER8> Mobile Safari has "reader view" build in for most sites, but it doesn't work on every site. It works on most blogs and news sites though. You can find the button left from the URL.

<comment><USER9> Desktop Safari processes the page to try and identify if there is a block of text that might look like prose. If it finds it, you get the button. If it can't, you don't.

I assume mobile Safari does something similar.

<comment><USER10> Yep, it's an algorithm site authors have no control over. It's definitely useful, but not something to rely on as a dev.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely this should be solved in a single place (the browser) rather than asking every site to implement their own plus & minus buttons.

MobileSafari offers text size adjustment when in the article reading mode (via the paragraph icon at the left of the address bar), but that mode is only offered based on some heuristic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, I really hate github that is doing this to their mobile page. I have to sometimes switch to desktop version to get zoom functionality (and some others, that are missing from mobile version)

<comment><USER13> Fork functionality is notably missing from mobile...

<comment><USER14> Honest question: how often are you going to fork and then develop software from a mobile phone?

<comment><USER15> Not the OP, but I often discover interesting github projects when browsing HN on mobile and would like to star the project (basically, a bookmark) or even fork it (if I think I'll want to make code changes and possible send a pr). Has happened a couple of times in the past week.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Starring seems important and useful - but I can't imagine that many people fork and then develop from a mobile phone... but I'm probably wrong :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's why I'm using Firefox's reading mode more and more. It'll get the content 95% of the time right and the typography is just gorgeous

<comment> irq-1 Firefox still needs a minimum font size, or font scaling like Chrome has.

<comment><USER17> Min font size has been in since early Netscape... or are you talking about something else?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not just you. Everyone's mobile site seems to choose font sizes that are readable from across the room on my 5.5 inch phone. I'll quit reading articles that do this. I'm starting to collect a list of hostnames I won't visit because the text is too big to read comfortably on my phone.

<comment><USER19> Mine is the exact opposite problem :) text too damn small!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would say the average designer assumes that users will punch-zoom in to see text in more detail. The only sites that irritate me in this regard are the ones that don't let you pinch-zoom.

Full disclosure: I have great eyesight, so there isn't a font size too small for me on mobile browsers - the limit is what the screen can display. I sympathise with users with imparied vision, but I'd still claim that pinch- zooming is the generally-accepted answer.

<comment><USER21> Really now. Open HN in a mobile browser and tell me you don't have to squint to read at the default zoom level.

<comment><USER22> HN is a bad example seeing as the maintainers refuse to put in the small amount of effort it would take to make it work decently on mobile.

<comment><USER23> I think the way conversations thread would be pretty hard to do comfortably on mobile

<comment><USER24> Reddit manages OK. I wonder what level of petitioning would be required to get the admins to fix HN? Or are all the cool kids using an app which avoids this problem?

<comment><USER25> Which version of Reddit? Reddit, Reddit Mobile, or Reddit Mobile Beta?

<comment><USER24> [https://reddit.com/.compact](https://reddit.com/.compact) is the one I use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I miss the first Android browser's ability to reflow text as you zoomed. I hate zooming in to read, but having to scroll left and right as well as down.

<comment><USER27> Why would they take that away? That seems like the most useful feature a browser could offer. Does anyone know what mobile browsers do support reflow? I'd switch to one without hesitation if it did.

<comment><USER28> Opera, called Text Wrap under settings. Works great.

<comment><USER27> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I feel the same way. The problem is that it's just random ones it selects, leaving other fonts tiny and some massive.

<comment><USER30> The old default android browser was so much nicer than Chrome in this area; you zoomed in until it was comfortable, then double tapped and the text, not the whole page, would reflow to fit horizontally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The worst is when some sites resize certain components but not others, making them painfully small.

The most vivid example is Reddit's text resizing but the actual interactive points of the site (like arrows and replying to comments) are tiny as hell. (Of course, it is Reddit, so it's not like anything of value is lost...)

</comment><comment><USER32> Font size can definitely be annoying, although it hasn't bitten me very often - usually you can pinch to get a decent enough size. Far more frequently for me is the header bar that stays pinned to the top or bottom of the page while scrolling instead of being at a fixed position. I'm not going to read a long article with only 60% of my already tiny screen.

I've even seen sites that try to mimic the behavior of the address bar where if you scroll down it disappears but if you scroll up it pops back in. I've never once clicked on anything these header bars have to offer except by mistake...

</comment><comment><USER33> As many noted, disabling pinch-/doubletap-zoom results in faster click events.

It is hard to implement a scaling function if you designed your page using absolute pixels as units. With relative font-sizes (em,rem,vh,vw,wmax etc) you could just change the (absolute) font-size of the body tag to resize everything else. Scaling would then be easy to do in with a little JavasSript, a plugin or by just honoring the default body font-size the browser set.

The problem is, that using em makes your styles more complex. They are difficult to use, because ems are relative to the parent element for font-size and to the element itself for other attributes. If you define a font-size in em for an element you have to know, where you are going to put this element on the page. Define the font-size for a list, put a list inside a list and you messed up your design. Unfortunately the other relative units are not as well supported, so most websites just use pixels.

Many websites use the Bootstrap framework these days and Bootstrap uses pixels, too. Here is a discussion about the topic in their issue tracker:

[https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/1943](https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/1943)

Ultimately their solution is to drop IE8 support and use rem, which is relative to the body font-size, in version 4. I look forward to that. While people could still mess up the scaling by adding their own absolute font-size declarations, Bootstrap websites will then default to being easily scalable.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you create a bookmark with the following URL, it will allow you to override the zoom setting on any site (at least on iOS):

javascript:document.querySelector('meta%5Bname=viewport%5D').setAttribute('content','width=device- width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=10.0,user-scalable=1');

<comment><USER10> Dear lord. This is so simple and a great idea, even if it temporarily breaks a few sites! THANKS!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> From reading the comments here, it's definitely not just you.

But it's not a problem for me on my recent Samsung Galaxy. I actually prefer sites that don't delay to wait for a possible double-click. And accidentally resizing is a hassle because then I have to limit my thumb/finger movements to straight vertical lines, or else I'll end up scrolling horizontally as well.

When I had a smaller phone, I used a Dolphin browser, which reflowed text as well as resized fonts when I double-tapped. I thought that was fine. But if the default pinch/doubletap behavior is to zoom the whole page like Chrome does, I'd rather not deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER36> There are a lot of accessibility problems in mobile devices. No large fonts. No high contrast mode. And have you ever watched someone with unsteady hands try to touch a button without it being interpreted as a swipe or double-touch?

</comment><comment><USER37> People are disabling zooming because it causes a delay, which is in turn caused by developers trying to make HTML act like native apps.

Articles on the web should not be JavaScript heavy. HTML is responsive and zoomable by default. It takes a few thousand lines of JavaScript and CSS to make it hard for people to read.

It just boggles my mind how much of the web is static content embedded in some whiz-bang JavaScript framework. It's static content. Serve it from static files you generate, let hyperlinks just be hyperlinks, and get on with your day. :)

/grumpy low vision user is grumpy.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sure is. Not for me, but I met a guy the other day who is already nearly blind and getting progressively worse. He uses an iPad to make 1-inch-high fonts so he can make out the character shapes, and said he wants to hang onto reading with his eyes as long as he can before switching to speech.

I can read teensy text (although with my astigmatism not so easily as when I was 20), but my acquaintance can't. He seemed like a cool guy and I'd hate to see him disconnected from the resources I enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER39> Note that Chrome on Android has a "force enable zoom" setting in Accessibility panel while Opera for Android (which uses Blink engine, same as Chrome) has reflow-on-zoom support (called "text wrap" in settings).

On Windows Phone there is a system-level setting "ease of access > allow zooming on all web content".

This basically solves the issue for me. I browse almost exclusively using Opera.

<comment><USER39> For curious souls, Chrome on Android sometimes supports reflow out of the box, depending on vendor. Apparently vendors like to set different flags in browsers to differentiate themselves from each other. HTC is one of those who ships Chrome with reflow on zoom enabled. It is a bit battery draining to recalculate stuff each time a user zooms hence it's not enabled by default.

*(according to research from Peter Paul Koch from his Mobile web handbook)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Lately the major issue I've seen is font size being too big on landscape orientation, when portrait looks fine. That when the content is not already covered by stupid top/bottom fixed bars that were only designed for portrait mode.

</comment><comment><USER41> How do you think about the OS accessbility zoom features?

<comment><USER42> They're pretty terrible, at least on Android. The latest stock android browser doesn't have have a text zoom option, and the text zoom features in chrome or firefox don't really work reliably.

<comment><USER43> What sucks is Android used to be good, at least in a lot of cases. I don't know how much this generalizes, but on Hacker News I used to be able to pinch to zoom, then double tap the screen and the site would wrap at the zoomed size. This went away somewhere around Ice Cream Sandwich, not sure exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I rarely see sites where I cannot zoom in. Many do not let me zoom out though. Instead, they display what feels like 4 words per line.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like we might see a major shift in functionality, adoption and competition in the wings for the mobile space.

</comment><comment><USER45> I have to do "see PC version" then do pinch zoom.

</comment><comment><USER46> Another problem is when a non-zoomable mobile site makes it impossible to view a list of thirty items at once; instead, you get just a few items in your viewport and you have to scroll incessantly to browse the page.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yep, instantly closed</comment>


Ask PG: Do you invest in any startups outside of YC? - <AUTHOR>

Do you invest, advise or other ways involved with any co.s that choose not to participate in YC or have matured beyond a YC stage? Some startups need  more your sage advice, than any investment. <comment><USER2> YC itself is more about advice than investment.

But in answer to your question, no, except for one startup from Imagine K12.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any other option for my (slightly) grown-up startup with a ton of traction to come pitch you?

p.s I did read the YC FAQ etc. But hoping that might be just the "official line" :-)

<comment><USER3> If I was in your situation and my startup closely aligned with pg's interests what I'd do is find a mutual contact who pg trusts and will give you a rave introduction.

For that matter the same applies to any other investor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love that pg actually browses hn and responds to questions like this.</comment>


Colorize your election party - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2008/11/03/colorize-your-election-party/

<comment><AUTHOR> Regardless of the politics, this cool hack takes the election results and describes how you could hook them up to a DMX controller to change the lighting depending on how things are going.</comment>


Nonplussed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/10/nonplussed/ <comment><USER2> Experiences like this led me to leave Facebook, then LinkedIn, a while ago. I haven't deleted my Google+ account only because laziness and fear of an experience like the article's author prevent me from going to the site. People describe leaving as trendy, as if leaving had something to do with other people as opposed to the sites' own repellent behavior. For me leaving was easy and fun -- [http://joshuaspodek.com/leaving-facebook-easy-and- fun](http://joshuaspodek.com/leaving-facebook-easy-and-fun). Experience has unequivocally shown me my life is better without them.

I have a feeling the market forces forcing Google, Facebook, et al into an arms race after your privacy and personal life will motivate people to leave more and more in favor of small players that do one thing well.

I expect people here will see the writing on the wall first that the sooner you get out the better. Yes, social networks have benefits, but they have costs too.

Deleting Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc accounts improves your life. Deleting them earlier improves your life earlier.

<comment><USER3> "Experiences like this led me to leave Facebook"

I would go on a tangent to this, that I never got any actionable information or other life improvement from facebook. I tried, really hard, for six months, to participate and get something out of it, but it was just a huge time waster so I wiped it.

Although supposedly youtube is only (or mostly) used for trash talking comments on kitten videos, I have occasionally gotten actual useful data and experiences from youtube. Programming screencasts and the like. Also the videos I watch and comment on are of a professional-ish level I like being associated with.

So I'm finding the outrage hard to generate. If the whole world finds out my real name liked a university video lecture about simulating a vibrating 2-D plane using multiple stack computers solving differential eqs instantiated on a FPGA as a lab exercise at Columbia, well, I'm not going to ragequit youtube over it. In fact I think thats just great.

Its their property; if they want to drastically change its culture (to something I happen to prefer) its hard for me to feel bad about it. There was a cheesy falling apart barn nearby the Interstate not too far from where I live. The new owners painted it; outrage from traditionalists who would rather see it torn down than painted. What do I care, other than I happen to like the new paint job? If the complainers don't like it, they can put up their own antique barn and let it decay unpainted, or they could have bought the old barn.

The original author didn't like that the rabbit bathing video site decided to dump him, so shout out, you can't dump me because I'm dumping you first. Well all this high school dating drama is amusing for me to watch, but I have a FPGA video to get back to watching. And if someone finds out, that's OK with me.

Unlike facebook, youtube can demand a fair trade because its content is actually worth something. OK here's my real name, now let me watch something useful.

This might be the end of youtube as we know it, as a complete waste of time, I mean. It doesn't mean the end of the site.

<comment><USER4> but you have option. like that fancy pants academic video? nice. thumbed up a silly cat video just to show someone later on your phone? too bad. its there now too.

<comment><USER5> It's very hard for me to imagine someone who wants to try so very hard to maintain a serious public image that they won't be caught liking a silly cat video on YouTube. That seems hilariously self-important.

<comment><USER6> >It's very hard for me to imagine someone who wants to try so very hard to maintain a serious public image that they won't be caught liking a silly cat video on YouTube. That seems hilariously self-important.

Eh, I think this idea that we must live our whole life in public (to the /same/ public using the /same/ identity) is a bit insidious. Especially in these days of "cultural fit" \- it leads to this idea that you need to spend your private life in service of your professional life.

If you have an unpopular hobby or sexual proclivity, keeping that out of your professional life, in many circles, could be even seen as polite; At the office? nobody wants to know about your love for furry fan-fiction.

Sure, cute cat videos are different from furry fan fiction, but... if I'm "following" you? I will "unfollow" if there are a bunch of cute cat videos. I mean, unless I'm following you for your great taste in cute cat videos. More to the point, if I'm evaluating you and, say, your long screeds advocating a political cause I find particularly distasteful keep coming up, I might have a hard time evaluating you rationally, on your skills. (Also, if I'm hiring you, I want you to be able to leave the bullshit at home. Leaving the bullshit in another identity helps with that sort of thing.)

I really think that multiple identities is the solution. You can have your cute cat picture identity, your furry fan-fiction identity, your radical socialist identity, and your professional programmer identity. I can choose to follow the identity I find interesting. I mean, yeah, if someone /really wants/ to connect your furry fan-fiction identity to your professional programmer identity, they can. However, if you practice proper identity hygiene, it becomes much easier for me (or another third party) to interact with the professional programmer, without dealing with your hobbies I have no interest in, or maybe even find distasteful.

Most of the "real name" folks seem to think that by making everything public, we will see that we are all weirdos, and become more accepting of our differences.

I guess that's my prime problem with the 'real name' folks; _I_ think that it's just fine to do business with, or even relate socially to folks that have hobbies or political views that I believe are downright wrong. I don't think that 'acceptance' is required for that. I think that you can like and trust one facet of a person's personality, without liking other facets of their personality.

I want to be able to say "I think this person is a great programmer" without implying that I also endorse their badly written Spock/Kirk slash fiction, or their half-baked anarcho-capitalist political rants.

<comment><USER7> but then why do you "like" or "+1" the cat videos in the first place, if not to make it known to the world that you liked them?

<comment><USER6> >but then why do you "like" or "+1" the cat videos in the first place, if not to make it known to the world that you liked them?

My point is that I may have 'cat video friends' who, you know, are in to that sort of thing, with whom I may wish to share these sorts of things.

My point is that while it's fine to have my cat video friends, I ought to have the option of not sharing my 'cat fancy' with other groups who may look down on that sort of thing.

<comment><USER7> well then it looks like you are not looking for the +1 button, but for something more complicated than that, an ACL'd endorsement of sorts. Right now the closest thing to that is to just reshare the video to your 'cat video friends' circle :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am mostly for the ostensible cleaning up of YouTube comments, but what got me was that any time you share a YouTube video on Google+ proper or comment in a thread where someone shared a YouTube video, it automatically cross-posts what you said back to the comments underneath the video on YouTube. And that's not just for shares/comments going forward: it's everything you've ever shared publicly, ever. I'm now getting inane YouTube-level comments on stuff I shared months ago because I happened to share a popular YouTube video on Google+.

As part of the rare breed of people actually using Google+ proper, it's really turned me off from the whole thing. Even though I shared YouTube videos publicly and commented on publicly-viewable Google+ posts with YouTube videos, I intended to only post my comments and shares _on_ Google+, not syndicated everywhere at a later date without additional consent[1] and especially not the cesspool that is the YouTube comment section. I don't really understand why anyone thought that'd be okay. And anecdote isn't data, but talking to other Google+ users I know, nobody seemed to be aware that this was going to happen: they all just thought the identities would be merged, but if you post on Google+, it'd stay on Google+.

[1]: I'm aware that there's probably some clause in their privacy policy that gave them the legal ability to do this, but Google is usually pretty decent when it comes to informing of changes to privacy/visibility options.

<comment><USER9> Ugh. This was my problem with Google+ too. Everything you do ripples out into the rest of the internet in a creepy way.

When I was freelancing, I emailed back and forth with potential clients through the Gmail interface. One day I saw this party pic of a 20-something girl with beer in hand, identified by the full name of a receptionist I had emailed with professionally but never actually met. It was a suggestion from Google to connect with her on Google+, which I'm sure she'd have been mortified by. I deleted my account that day.

<comment><USER10> This and TFA hit to the heart of the problem with Google+: Google has willfully refused to acknowledge or understand that singular humans have multiple personas, and that we do not and cannot allow those to mix. Your professional face is not the same as your close-family personal face is not the same as your secret webcomic artist handle is not ... you get the idea.

There are so many mundane variations on that theme, and then there are very serious ones: those seeking support for addiction, as survivors of abuse, or other situations that have social stigma or personal risk attached to them. Some needs are simply _private_ in that way a vulnerable person needs secure anonymity lest the public light itself become a chilling effect, of which health concerns are a common example.

The architecture of Google+ is such that it is inherently inhuman in its disregard for privacy and for applying different "pen names" to the various situations of life.

<comment><USER11> > Google has willfully refused to acknowledge or understand that singular > humans have multiple personas, and that we do not and cannot allow those to > mix.

They may not acknowledge it, but they certainly understand it. The whole value proposition of Circles was initially that'd you'd only share what you want with who you want.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. When G+ first hit the scene, before Google's big push to own and publish the unified identity for every physical human, Circles looked like a promising experiment. A lot of people I know who were fed up with Facebook started exploring Google+ because of that.

Then Google changed directions entirely (along with the big management shakeup that flipped Google from a bottom-up org to a top-down org) and those ideas were effectively killed. And every single person I knew who'd been toying with G+ dropped it like a hot potato.

<comment><USER12> Please explain how the idea of circles has been killed.

I just went to the YouTube comment box, and right there is the control for what circles to publish to: [http://imgur.com/3ZEB9Th](http://imgur.com/3ZEB9Th)

<comment><USER13> The main problem for me that in different circles I might have different persona (different name, different image, some parts of my identity not exposed - like my workplace). It is mask I wear is important not who I'm talking to.

<comment><USER12> G+ lets you control what circles can see your employment info: [http://imgur.com/nuBP0Qz](http://imgur.com/nuBP0Qz)

Personally I much prefer that G+ (and Facebook, for that matter) lets you interact with real people and not personas.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that in reality you have different faces: coworker, father, lover and etc. Neither of these are less real and many of them not necessary has real name, you can be "Your Name" (without surname) for your coworker, "Daddy" for your child and "Honey" for your lover.

I just try to explain why Google+ does not work for me at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how much engagement Google/Facebook/et. al. lose from people who are about to make a comment/post a status/etc., and then thing 'Hm, no - this is private now, but what about in a year when they automatically change my privacy settings without asking me?'

Put another way, imagine I am a teenager or college student who uses Facebook.

1\. Start to upload a photo from my phone of me and my friends doing shots

2\. Try to figure out how (on my phone!) to set privacy settings so that my younger brother (who is my Facebook friend) and my parents (who aren't, but use the Internet and sometimes Google my name) can't see it.

3\. Remember that Facebook has a history of "expanding" privacy settings retroactively

4\. Think "Ah, fuck it", and send a Snapchat to my friends instead.

In reality it's probably not that common right now, but hopefully that may increase in the future. You can only pull the rug out from under your users so many times before learn to walk along another path.

<comment><USER15> I don't really want to dive into this conversation in any real depth, but I do want to point out that Google+, with old features or new, has never violated the ACLs that users set. If you set something to private, it remains private forever.

To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on G+.

<comment><USER14> > I do want to point out that Google+, with old features or new, has never > violated the ACLs that users set. If you set something to private, it > remains private forever.

I know that, which is why I used the example of Facebook.

However, Google+ _does_ make it incredibly easy to leak information that I would otherwise consider private accidentally.

For example, I can't use Google+ with my primary email address, as it's a Google+ account. However, because it's linked with my Gmail account (which does have a Google+ account), some people who have added me on Google+ have been able to figure out my Gmail address (which I haven't used for email purposes in years[0]).

I can imagine all the technical reasons for this, but that doesn't change the fact that it feels a bit wrong for a service to hand out my old email address (which I never give out anymore) to people I've met recently and who have added me on Google+ _using my current email address_.

Imagine your Google+ email address is something that you can't change, but don't really want people to see anymore - this isn't uncommon; it appeared in a New York Times piece just yesterday, in the context of college admissions[1]. Thankfully, my personal email address is much more tame than that student's, but that still doesn't mean I want anybody to know or use it nowadays.

Furthermore, it's incredibly easy to sign up "accidentally" to use Youtube with Google+ and your "real name" instead of continuing to use your pseudonym.

As for the distinction you point out - I know the difference, and you know the difference. But most users don't.

> To do otherwise would be corporate suicide.

Apparently not _completely_ \- Facebook's gotten away with it for _years_![2]

[0] This may have been fixed, since it was a while ago that I last noticed, but it was still the case for quite a while.

I would have to go through my inbox to remember the details of why this happened - I remember debugging and tracking it down. But the fact that it took that much effort to discover why my new acquaintances suddenly knew my old (personal) email address, and that I can't remember anymore, speaks volumes as to how easy it would be for a less savvy user to accidentally leak information that they wanted to keep private.

[1][http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved- your-g...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-gpa- then-they-saw-your-tweets.html?_r=0)

[2] [http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/](http://mattmckeon.com/facebook- privacy/) \- this graph doesn't distinguish clearly between those which were automatically retroactive and those which weren't, but that's a topic that's been well-reported and is easy to search for.

<comment><USER15> I'm honestly not sure how your email address would be leaked, vanity URLs are name-based and at least one of the reasons Plus uses ID strings was in order to prevent leaking any account details through the URL. I'm sorry that other people are figuring it out, that sucks. If you remember what happened and think that G+ has had a hand in the leakage, please feel free to ping me (my URL is in my profile) and I'll try to follow it up.

 _Personally_ I do feel that G+ has done a good job at communicating to users the privacy they do and don't have, as the ACLs were baked in at the beginning. I think users have had the possibility to be confused when data is being used outside the [http://plus.google.com](http://plus.google.com) domain, like Shared Endorsements and the YouTube comments, as this opens up the worry ACLs are being violated. I think there's more work that can be done to communicate that this hasn't happened, such as putting the "Shared (publicly|privately)" on YouTube comments so you can see why those are there.

<comment><USER14> > If you remember what happened and think that G+ has had a hand in the > leakage, please feel free to ping me (my URL is in my profile) and I'll try > to follow it up

Thanks for the offer - I really appreciate it. I think it had something to do with group contacts in Gmail, but I can't remember. If I have some time today I might take a look.

To clarify: I'm not exactly mad at Google in this case, because I'm a developer and I know how tricky it can be to get these things right even in small, standalone products[0]. And unlike some people on HackerNews, I don't think this is a result of bad intentions. It's just that, every time I see something like this happen (beagle3 points out the example of Buzz below), I can't help but notice that users' trust is both fragile (easily broken) and unforgiving (no benefit of the doubt).

These things are tough to get right, but they're very critical for the _long_ -term success of a product.

[0] Also, the consequences for me happened to be pretty mild, thankfully.

<comment><USER16> It sounds like it was a failure of design.

<comment><USER17> Then perhaps they shouldn't have taken the design into use until it was... usable. And it's really more than merely design in any case, it's at least a pretty core piece of underlying philosophy - connect everything to G+.

It's one thing to do this if you're a new service, with users that don't have all kinds of baggage with you - if your UI isn't great they can choose to accept it for the value you offer or reject it. But existing users it's almost a kind of fraud - you convince em to join under a false pretense but then change the rules half way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _It's not that I find Google or even Google+ itself bad. But the connections between the account, the Google+ profile, the Google profile, the various websites and contact lists_

This is totally it for me. I have a few Google accounts (an 'original' one and two Apps For Your Domain ones for e-mail and work) and it seems Google has made Plus accounts for each and I have things spread around them all. I've seen stories where people tried to "merge" accounts and ended up losing access to their mail, etc.. so rocking the boat doesn't seem worth it to me.

I don't mind Google's (usually great) services but it's the _binding together_ that makes me wary.

<comment><USER19> How do we reconcile Google Only Hires Geniuses with their executional incompetence across multiple (dozens of?) products?

Is it a pride of ego fallacy? They think they are the best and they can do no wrong, so they just keep doing things without thinking results through?

Too many logical programmers trying to have input on end users/UI/UX decisions where visuals and emotions are more important?

Too many 24 year old bro managers running around trying to make a name for themselves by manipulating people in flashy ways instead of quietly making the world a better place?

<comment><USER20> I agree with the sentiments, but most Google products worked better when they were done by logical programmers. They've all got much less usable since the fancy UI designers came in and screwed them up.

<comment><USER21> > _They 've all got much less usable since the fancy UI designers came in and > screwed them up._

See also, the decline of GNOME. This isn't a problem unique to Google.

<comment><USER20> True. See also: The New Yahoo...

<comment><USER22> And apperantly Win8 too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who likes to avoid posting too much incriminating information on social network, I think the main problem of this trend is that the Internet is turning into No Country for Lurkers.

I can't even _favourite_ nor _like_ a video on YouTube anymore without being subjected to the whole carrousel of signing up for G+. I get the impression that there's some asshole at companies like Google creating a Markov chain for bumping head-first into a registration wall for the most _inane_ lurker actions.

And this is not to mention the absolutely awful situation of being locked out of my own list of favourites, because I am now required to sign up for G+ to export them.

Don't you love the Silicon Valley CEOs who say they want to index the world's information and allow everyone to share it - except this is becoming increasingly impossible on their own platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Quora.

I get that companies have to make money, but I think the companies' business models are perfectly aligned with their personal philosophies.

<comment><USER24> > I can't even favourite nor like a video on YouTube anymore without being > subjected to the whole carrousel of signing up for G+.

But you can bookmark. Or does that not make sense on a phone? My galaxy has been in my sock drawer for a couple years now, I forget.

<comment><USER23> After I signed up on Pinboard, I've taken to save my bookmarks there instead. Still, an IFTTT script that saves to Pinboard, whenever I favourite on YouTube would be less annoying and also allow me to have my favourites on YouTube.

<comment><USER24> I use pinboard too, _great_ service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Google has really lost its way to do UX. Google plus and youtube are not the one ones.

I have no permanent way to disable Youtube asking me to merge accounts except goat sacrifice and writing directly to Larry Page - "If I rejected you 25 time why do you think I will agree on the 26th"

I had to use Google Maps yesterday - the mobile app. Few things of notice - scale was never given on screen. Also there was not a way by which you could measure the distance between two points.

There are numerous inconsistencies between their products - why is google keep hidden when you are at drive google.com and on and on and on.

I think that this could be case of either no dogfooding or extreme dogfooding - either no one at google uses their own services or they use only google ones and have forgotten that people in the outside world are not so invested in the google ecosystem.

<comment><USER26> It seems unlikely that this is by accident and that people at Google are not aware of how annoying it is.

Perhaps, just perhaps, they've decided they will make more money by forcing people to use G+. I see plenty of comments on YouTube, still of YT quality, with "Real Names". It's not like there's really a useful alternative to YT for most people. Google gets nothing from people commenting anonymously on YT. Annoying those people is no big loss - they won't stop visiting YT to consume. And for those that sign up with G+, they'll eventually gain more money from advertising.

This whole attitude that this is sheer UX incompetence is moronic.

(Now, with respect to the whole accounts management stuff and Google Apps and what not, that seems like technical issues.)

<comment><USER27> This would be fine if they actually provided a "I never want to comment. Never link my G+ and Youtube Accounts." option. But they keep asking forever.

<comment><USER26> How is it in their interests to provide a "I never want to link" option? They keep asking forever because they know that'll increase conversion ratios.

If people start leaving for an alternative service, then they might care. And who could launch an alternative? Yahoo? Microsoft? MS tried and bungled it like crazy (like everything MSN.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > You know what? Forget it, I don't even want to comment any more. It was a > dumb video anyway.

I went through this exact process and thought ("screw this, ugh!") several times before I just decided to stop hanging out on youtube and commenting on peoples' videos. I used to waste a huge amount of time doing this, but now I only sometimes watch things that others have discovered and shared with me. I don't comment or browse like I used to, and I'm sure their advertising revenue off of me has dropped off a cliff.

It also seems like the amount of intrusive/unskippable advertising has rocketed up, too, over the last couple of years while they were forcing G+ on the world. They're kidding themselves if they think I'm going to happily watch a 30 second ad before a 2 minute viral video.

I was annoyed/sad at first when they started making these changes, but now I realize I was mostly wasting my time doing that stuff anyway. So thanks, Google, for making your site less fun to use; it really has saved me a lot of time.

<comment><USER29> My though exactly. Perhaps the anger and frustration of this integration is rooted from people being upset about being more accountable (through the real identity) and cautious, and Google is simply improving the quality of comments this way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hey all. I'm the author. I don't really have much to add here except that I was afraid the article, which I dashed off as all that stuff was happening, would come off as whiny. Hope that isn't the case. Thanks for reading and linking.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the tip on blocking youtube.com cookies. Never thought of that.

<comment><USER30> I added it after reading it in another thread here the other day, would give credit if I remembered who mentioned it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel the pain. Just this week I deleted my Google+ account, or profile, or whatever it is. I never used G+ after initially signing up, so I had no use for it.

Deleting the account seems to have had no ill effects. The deletion page did warn me that "third party sign on" would stop working, and I do use the Google third party login via OAuth because some sites rely on it, but nothing broke. Is there some kind of different "login with G+"?

I also moved calendaring and reminders to Fruux [1], and I have previously moved my email and contacts to Fastmail, and my notes to Evernote. I'm still on GTalk via Adium, though -- is there a good replacement for that?

Moving away from the big provides _feels_ good. It feels liberating, in fact. Google and Apple provide whole ecosystems of services, and they really, really want you to buy into their whole integrated system, and they design their systems to stretch their tendrils as far into your computing experience as possible.

At least with Apple that's core to their long-established philosophy -- integrated devices that just work -- but I'm a big believer in decentralization. I want to pick the best possible system that integrates with everything using open standards.

[1] [https://fruux.com](https://fruux.com)

[2] [https://www.fastmail.fm/](https://www.fastmail.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm all for this change, largely because of the crappy anonymous comments you see out there on YouTube, which was the point of this transition in the first place.

However, forcing Google+ onto people does have me wary as well. I don't mind using Google+, but it seems like Google's way to slowly worm their way into people using its social component. I admittedly am not sure why it affects me, but something about that does rub me the wrong way (although not enough to ditch using Google services). It's not quite insidious, but it does feel like it gives off the vibe that we are the product, even more than usual.

<comment><USER34> "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Anonymous Youtube comments suck, but anonymity enables people to express unpopular opinions. The real problem is tyranny of the majority. Attaching real names does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

Google should be smart enough to build a proper moderation system and retain anonymity.

<comment><USER3> "The real problem is tyranny of the majority."

Tyranny of the minority, you mean. 50%+ of internet users are not racist trolls, for example. I suspect 50%+ of anonymous commenters are, at least in mass market sites without any Karma type system... like youtube.

I'm not seeing the problem in realigning global traffic such that 4chan and reddit get more troll traffic and youtube gets less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To remove your Google+ account but keep your Google services running, visit the following link:

[https://plus.google.com/downgrade/](https://plus.google.com/downgrade/)

To remove your Google+ account from YouTube:

Go to youtube settings: [http://www.youtube.com/account](http://www.youtube.com/account)

Click "Return name to <name>, and disconnect Google+ profile"

I was an early adopter to Google+ but screw it, I'm sick of dealing with this crap.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've had it with the whole online social thing to be honest - it seems to lead to nothing but evil deceptive tactics like the dialog box in the article with only one option. The internet used to be fun...now I get the distinct impression that everyone is out to get me.

<comment><USER37> What can be done to reverse this trend? Or to create something altogether different from the current "internet"?

<comment><USER36> Personally I think it can't be reversed. Its too profitable and there are too many sheeple out there.

As for something "altogether different". I don't see it happening. There are just too many powerful vested interest at work. e.g. We can't even get a HTML standard pushed through without DRM.

This might sound cynical, but personally I feel its the end of an era. The internet used to be the wild west where anything is possible. Now its become a commercial turkey shoot via dark patterns, micro-transactions, data mining and a dozen other buzzwords.

<comment><USER24> > Personally I think it can't be reversed. Its too profitable and there are > too many sheeple out there.

The "internet," i.e. TCP/IP, is still there pretty much as it always was. Google's interface is almost all web on top of the internet, Facebook too.

Anyone is free to use anything else implemented on the internet. Fastmail makes a handy living at implementing smtp and imap on top of TCP/IP; their value is excellent implementation along with _service_.

It's always possible to sell good service.

You don't have to use the DRM parts.

And I agree, it is the end of an era, a really good era. But it's not the end.

<comment><USER36> > The "internet," i.e. TCP/IP, is still there pretty much as it always was.

That might be true to you & me, but to the masses the internet is google, facebook, twitter etc.

Yes you can build anything on it, but can you compete against an opponent that is bigger, more powerful, has networking effects on its side and is more willing to use questionable tactics? Service goes a long way, but it doesn't scale well and its not enough against those odds (imo).

>Anyone is free to use anything else implemented on the internet.

Are they? Its not really about what you are free to use, but more about what you can skip. See the author in the article...does he sound like he is free to _not_ use G+? Plus there are powerful networking effects at play...I never wanted a FB account but my friends kept bugging me about it. In a practical scenario users have very little freedom to do what they want & it only gets worse if they're technically illiterate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I was going to use Google Code for hosting my projects, but, after this fiasco, I think I'll just use Github instead.

Hey, at least I'll get to use a DVCS. :P

In all honesty, though, while this won't hurt Google right now, it's going to come back and bite them in the rear end soon enough. If they keep making these kinds of changes, what's next? Having to sign in to Google+ to use Android? A Google+ feed on the Chrome OS deskop? Requirements for Google+ account with "Developer Privileges" to download Go?

Again, this doesn't matter much now, but it's going to hurt them later. It happens to the best of everyone: Microsoft. Apple. Google.

<comment><USER39> I do both Google Code and Github. GC feels unmaintained these days, and there is no option for paid/private repositories. GC is also removing their download service - Github did the same but then later provided "releases" functionality.

Github's issue tracker is terrible (try to prioritise things) while GC is a lot better.

The one thing GC does really well is they let you have multiple repositories per project. This means you can have an Android repository, a server repository, a web site repository etc and they can all be on the same page using the same issue tracker, wiki etc. I've asked Github to implement this but they aren't interested. When each repo has its own wiki, issue tracker, releases etc it is far too painful (eg you can't move tickets between projects).

That also helps for documentation. My projects have extensive generated documentation. With github you have to dump that into a branch, and put generated content into a source code control system is not a good idea. With GC you can just created another repository and put the generated doc there.

I personally prefer Mercurial over git, but that isn't a realistic choice with github.

On the whole, while GC has some nice things, I doubt it has much of a future. I wish github would pick up the multiple repositories thing.

<comment><USER40> Out of curiosity, why would you prefer having multiple repos over a few top- level directories in one repo?

<comment><USER39> Because they are completely unrelated code bases sharing nothing. With subversion you could check out subtrees but that isn't practical with git.

For my personal projects a common pattern is a repo for the source and a repo for generated documentation.

For work projects we have an Android client (in Java), iOS client (in objective C), 3 different server components that share no code (Python), various analysis tools (Python), a client customisation layer (mini-Python), our website etc.

If all those were in one large repository it would be a huge sprawling mess. Also remember that branches are repository global. There would also be constant updates because other parts have changed, nothing to do with the component you are working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's okay folks, Google is only doing what umpteen companies before it have done -- like a good citizen of the tech ecosphere it is paving the way for the next great company.

</comment><comment><USER42> I may be mistaken, but I think the entire point of this recent change was to force people to use their real names and faces rather than commenting anonymously (due to the fact that youtube comment sections are typically the worst things ever), and if so it seems like google has actually achieved it's goal.

Now, whether it's a good decision to make it difficult/impossible to anonymously comment on youtube videos is an entirely separate discussion that I'm not taking a side on (yet), but I'd be interested in seeing a discussion about that here.

<comment><USER43> I see "improving comment quality" as the public excuse they use to keep you logged in to one universal account to make tracking you for advertising purposes easier. Binding this to a G+ account allows them to report that they have record-breaking activity on G+ every month, because everybody is technically forced to be logged into G+ to do any-goddamn-thing, and so it makes G+ seem like some tremendous success and makes more people "want" to use it.

The problem is that annoying the user doesn't really make them want to use it more. I thought G+ might've had potential at first, but seeing all the desperate crap that Google's pulled over the past few months has not only pushed me away from G+, but Google as a whole.

Besides, did anybody really care about the quality of youtube comments? Nobody ever read them with the expectation of gaining any sort of insight or knowledge. Even if this change does affect youtube comment quality, it won't change anybody's expectations of the comments. The only shift will be from "this video is totes retarded" to "this video is stupid."

<comment><USER44> Thank you for this! Seriously, I try and explain to people that the reason for conglomerating every service into one is to tell tales of high G+ user-base for greater ad revenue. It's like boasting about how Android has the largest phone deployment, while the UX and satisfaction of iOS far outweighs Android's ecosystem (no bias either way). Everything is turning into a big numbers sham with no care for the intelligence and technical navigational experience of user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> saiko-chriskun Again, am I really the only one here that doesn't care about all this? :P

<comment><USER45> No. Me too. I sometimes feel like I should - defending privacy is like maintaining herd immunity - it only works if we all do it. But I don't especially care. I don't love Google+ but I find it easy to ignore. Easier to ignore than Facebook mainly due to the fact that no-one tries to interact with me socially on it.

But the only places I really post are here and Reddit. I email stuff to close friends and occasionally use Facebook when I'm invited to an event but that's about the limit of my use of social media.

In general - I'm quite happy to be logged into Google across all services. It makes Google Now slightly more useful and I can happily ignore all the parts of it that don't interest me.

And advertisers are welcome to profile me to their heart's content - they just don't seem to be very good at it. I've never clicked on a targeted ad so it's seems a lot of effort to no real effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For those who consider deleting their G+ accounts:

Don't consider it if you're using Android, as some core apps will stop working then (like the photo-gallery).

Yup. It has come to this. Disable or delete your G+ account and your Android phone no longer works.

Google is getting pretty damn creepy. I sure hope the CM-team can come up with some decent replacement apps for all the stuff Google is fucking up these days.

<comment><USER47> Damn it. I have a Nexus 5 pre-ordered. Well.

Unrelated: [http://i.imgur.com/wbjCmbt.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/wbjCmbt.jpg)

Changing faces of Google is a scary phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The "real name" movement is an attempt to turn internet behavior into something more like a credit score.

<comment><USER49> Thankfully they don't require proof of your name, or I wouldn't be called Kim Jong-Un.

<comment><USER50> >Thankfully they don't require proof of your name

... yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I cannot agree with the sentiment of this article enough. The dropdown in my Youtube shows 3 different accounts. One using my personal email address and then another two which were created channels with the same name. One is linked to my Google+ account (my main one) and the other for some reason is linked to another Google+ account Google created for me. That's 3 different Google+ profiles created for the one email. This is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm leery enough about commenting on different sites that use Disqus as it is.

</comment><comment><USER52> The people at Google are really pushing for broad adoption of G+. If you think about it, it's pretty logical as they know Facebook is only going downhill and they are trying to get everybody onboard. The reaction I'm hearing a lot however, is they are being too pushy.

I've even had a few people who accidentally signed up for a G+ account ask me how to delete it because they kept receiving 'Top X posts on G+' mails without knowing what it is. I don't think a lot of good things come with this kind of tactic.

</comment><comment><USER53> It would be better to just drop YouTube comments. They are a usually a cesspool of flamewars that add little value to the content.

</comment><comment><USER20> Petitioning Google Google: Change the Youtube comment section back to its original form.

[http://www.change.org/petitions/google-change-the-youtube- co...](http://www.change.org/petitions/google-change-the-youtube-comment- section-back-to-its-original-form)

Stands at 80,445 supporters now.

<comment><USER38> I signed it, but it won't change anything. Either way, Google has a right to refuse, and even if they don't, it doesn't automatically mean we're saved. Google will continue to integrate Google+ with many of their other products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> At one point he says he wants to comment as something else so no one sees him comment, then he says he'll post it to facebook so everyone he knows sees his comment.

I'm not going to comment on anything else in the article, this just struck me as odd and obviously contradictory.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've been trying to figure out how to delete Google+ for a while, without accidentally nuking some of the other services such as Picasa etc. Heard of folks losing a bunch of data (Youtube videos?) when they remove their G+ accounts, so that's a huge bummer.

Perhaps it's time to move on from Google Photos, flickr maybe? I don't want another social network.

<comment><USER56> Yahoo/Flickr/Tumblr is moving full steam ahead into Yahoo social network, completely ignoring why people still cling to them.

<comment><USER55> Sigh, there's no way out huh?

<comment> mkr-hn Maybe Amazon will come out with a social network and a YouTube competitor. You can barely tell they own IMDB, and they seem content to stick with a policy of non-interference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Ever since Google Reader was discontinued, I no longer log in under my real account on my primary browser any more (I don't use Gmail's web interface either).

Frankly I think that's the way to go. Ideally, we'd have better identity support in our browsers to control which set of cookies to hand out based on which top-level URL we're visiting.

</comment><comment><USER58> The OP makes a good point. But I can't be the only one who wants to watch that bunny video now. Since you're using their work to make your blog post more visually compelling, why not actually link to it?

Here it is: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_J0AMPPD34](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_J0AMPPD34)

</comment><comment><USER59> Keep a separate Gmail/Google/G+ account for your phone and your desktop. If you want to get to your desktop email from your phone, Firefox for Android is less leaky than Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER60> Don't build your life on other peoples digital plantations.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Now there's one less egg in my Google basket, and I never have to pay attention to anything that has the word "Google+" in it again — just like I did with LinkedIn (stop inviting me, everyone in the world), Pinterest, and a number of other things I had no use for."

Enough said. The dude is a typical Facebook user who is addicted to his only social network and upset about integration between YouTube and G+. Better commenting system and difficulty of creating fake user accounts will increase the quality of comments. I guess the people who complain like to troll or post some obnoxious comments, this explains the frustration.

<comment><USER61> Disclaimer: This is my first comment on HackerNews and probably my last. I'm not a hacker or a software engineer and don't really belong on the site, so don't comment. I'm just some random guy who plays a lot of video games, uses a lot of reddit and has a rough interest in the technology industry. By extension, I watch a lot of YouTube videos from various channels that offer playthroughs (or 'Let's Plays') of games. This is why I say the following:

Unfortunately at this stage I think you are completely wrong. I suspect that you don't use YouTube very much and so are not seeing what has happened. I'm sorry if this sounds snide, it isn't meant to.

YouTube had a reputation with some as providing the worst internet comments outside 4chan. I doubt few could imagine it getting worse. This recent Google+ integration seems to be an experiment on Google's part to prove how naive that belief was.

You can now post hyperlinks in comments. This has led to people spamming links to 'screamer' videos, including the potential to disguise these links as the comment expanding feature. Comments can now have seemingly unlimited length, or at least are massively extended compared to the previous system; This has led to people spamming ASCII art images of genitals, pedobear, naked women, memes like the super shibe 'doge', and reams and reams of repeating text like "#FUCKGOOGLE". Actual advertiser spammers are soon going to catch onto this ability, so the messages offering free copies of popular video games like Minecraft no longer have to come with the polite request to copypaste them into your address bar - they can just be clicked. This is just the tip of the iceberg in the first few days. I know I'm not alone in wondering how long it will be before someone finds a way to exploit these new comments as a vector for directly delivering malware. And even if the hyperlinks are removed, it has created a enormous new canvas on which trolls, children and idiots can paint their own brand of humour. There does not currently seem to be any way of blanket blocking URLs, instead needing a filter list set up with every potential combination of keywords and domains.

The kind of people who create and post this stuff are the kind of people least likely to care about creating multiple throwaway accounts or having this rubbish leak into other websites. Anecdotally it seems that people who may care enough to try and contribute meaningfully are now more likely to abandon the comments section and Google+ out of frustration (just as this article concludes with). This could be turn out to be nothing but a win for the trolls, especially considering that removing the new features enabling them would be to render the system identical to the old one.

I don't like the channel myself but a _very_ popular personality called PewDiePie has now disabled comments on all his videos due to the change. Other channels seem to be following suit or considering it. If you would like to hear a very honest spiel about the frustration these changes provide, search for a channel called NerdCubed and look at his recent videos for a video on the comment section. The comments that could be found under your average YouTube video were already enough to drive a content creator to exasperation as is. Rather than helping, this has seemingly made things significantly worse.

<comment><USER62> Hey Jon, great informative post! I wouldn't write off your potential contributions to this site just because you're "not a hacker or software engineer."

I know I'm not the only one here to say that if you like well-formulated discussions like those that arise from your post, stick around and be a part of HN...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Hey Google, Facebook and others - please implement reddit-style commenting system. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER64> What a bunch of whiny kids. The Google+ addition to YouTube is a great change.

</comment><comment><USER65> Google is starting to collapse under its own weight, as all behemoths eventually do.

<comment><USER16> Their first mistake was going public.

<comment><USER66> We should all be so lucky to make a mistake like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Nonplussed is a dreadful word. It means either: 1) so surprised and confused that one is unsure how to react; 2) not disconcerted; unperturbed.

Definitions 1 and 2 are opposites. So, is he perturbed or not? "This is totally weird", or "this is weird, but I can so cope with it". Who knows.

<comment><USER68> Nonplussed is also _used_ to mean "uninspired" or "unimpressed" \- like when something is perhaps a little out of the ordinary [there is an expectation that it will have an impact one way or another] but still doesn't really have an effect on; almost exclusively in the phrase "I was pretty nonplussed by it all" or a close analogue of that.

Certainly this is the usage I've heard and used for the last 20 years or so.

<comment><USER69> Those people are using it incorrectly.

<comment><USER68> Language is ultimately about usage. The dictionary I checked with confirmed this meaning as a US neologism, I'm in the UK.

You could class this usage as "perplexed" but with a specific flavour of 'perplexity at the unimpressive nature of the subject'.

<comment><USER70> US colloquial usage - where the original, subtle UK usage goes to die; see also "presently," and "beg the question."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where Can I Find a Dell XPS Developer Ed with 32GB RAM? - <AUTHOR> Seems that 8GB is the only option without customization ability. <comment><USER2> Serious question: is there any difference between the developer editions and the non-developer editions except for the preinstalled OS? I have a non- developer XPS 15 (version from 2017 or 2018) and run Linux on it. The Dell website lists the current generation XPS 15 with 32 GB RAM. I'm curious why you don't consider the ones available?

</comment><comment><USER3> perhaps you might consider the new HP envy, it has upgradable RAM but the screen is worse...

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think you can.</comment>